Ms Fiona Wilson:

Yes. Because of the way our laws are here in Canada and in British Columbia, we did not want to be instructing our members to try to find shortcuts around the exemption. We did not want them utilising other pieces of legislation simply because decriminalisation was not addressing the direct concerns that communities were expressing about the matter of public consumption.

Another thing is that when we arrest somebody for causing a disturbance in public, for example, or breach of the peace, as soon as those behaviours stop, we are required to let that person go. It is best described as a temporary arrest provision. We recognise that when we arrest people who are high on drugs for things like being intoxicated in a public place and we take them to jail, they are very high risk. Jail is not the right place for a person who is in a drug crisis, much like it is not the right place for someone who is experiencing a mental health crisis. It becomes high risk for the individual and high risk for our police officers who man our jails as well. We did not want to rely on provisions to try to fill the gaps that decriminalisation left. We wanted to advocate for lawmakers to come up with solutions to address public consumption in a way that was addressing that issue head on. That is the easiest way to say it.