Ms Fiona Wilson:

A big difference between British Columbia and what was experienced in Oregon was that the police generally completely agree with the notion of not arresting people and putting them in jail by virtue of their personal drug use. That was our starting point in British Columbia. Everybody agreed with that. In fact, back in 2003 the Vancouver Police Department supported the creation of our first safe injection site in British Columbia, in fact across the country. In 2006, we were the first agency to stop responding to overdose deaths as a matter of routine, recognising that could be a barrier for people to call for help. We have been a leading advocate over the years for treatment on demand and safe supply and so it made sense for us to support decriminalisation, particularly in the wake of the devastating numbers of overdose deaths we were seeing.

When I say we had de facto decriminalisation across the province, I will use Vancouver as an example. In 2022, I believe we had five or six approved charges for simple possession in the city.

When you consider we are a population of about 700,000, and we get 700 to 800 calls for service a day, five or six in a year is very insignificant. What changed with decriminalisation, though, was that because the possession of under 2.5 g of illicit drugs became lawful, our police officers no longer had the authority, as they historically had, to go up to someone who was using in a problematic circumstance in public and say to them, "you need to leave because you cannot use here. If you continue to use here, I may arrest you and there could be consequences to that." When the behaviour became lawful, our police officers lost the authority to do that, which 99.9% of the time is what they would have done historically. That was one of the major failings of decriminalisation here in British Columbia, in my opinion.