Frank Mahovlich vs. Larry Campbell: Huh?

The Liberal senators all took a trip to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside Friday morning for a wee info session on the neighbourhood's battles with crime, drugs, poverty and addiction (not necessarily in that order).

The morning featured an odd exchange between NHL hall-of-famer Frank Mahovlich and former mayor Larry Campbell, who are of course, both now Liberal senators. See the bottom of this story for the scintillating exchange:

The federal government will never be able to shut down Vancouver’s supervised injection site, a prominent Liberal senator and former mayor pledged Friday.

“Insite will never shut down,” Senator Larry Campbell told a gathering of his federal party’s senators in Vancouver Friday.

“They’ll have to arrest me before they shut it down.”

Campbell, Vancouver’s mayor from 2002 to 2005, was hosting an information session for his Liberal senate colleagues in the city’s troubled Downtown Eastside. But the senators’ visit coincided with a round of arguments this week in B.C.’s top court that has the future of Insite, Vancouver’s supervised injection site, hanging in the balance.

“This is a medical issue,” Campbell told his colleagues, who are in town for this weekend’s Liberal Party convention. “The federal government has no jurisdiction – none – in this issue.”

But that’s not what the federal government believes.

The feds are seeking to overturn a B.C. Supreme Court Justice’s ruling last year that granted Insite a permanent exemption from federal drug possession and trafficking laws.

The ruling, which surprised even Insite supporters, effectively gave Insite the right to operate despite what Ottawa says.

A decision from the B.C. Court of Appeal isn’t expected for several weeks.

While the city, the province, the Vancouver Police Department and the local health authority all support Insite, the Conservative government has been openly critical of the facility.

“I think the site itself represents a failure of public policy, indeed of ethical judgment,” former Health Minister Tony Clement told the House of Commons committee on health last May.

It’s become clear there’s a huge divergence between how the federal government and Insite advocates believe drug addicts should be treated.

“Supervised injection is not medicine. It does not heal the person addicted to drugs,” Clement said last year.

Supporters, however, see Insite as a health measure on the continuum towards treatment.

“For some people, they may never stop using,” Liz Evans, a nurse and executive director of PHS Community Services Society, which co-manages Insite, told the Liberal senators Friday.

“But if they don’t get HIV, if they don’t die from overdose, then that’s their right.”
Many people who live in the group’s non-profit housing, Evans said, still actively use drugs. The difference is the tenants aren’t on the street.

While many senators appeared moved by Friday’s presentations, which included a senior police officer, an urban planner and frontline workers from the Downtown Eastside, at least one senator questioned what’s come to be known in Vancouver as a harm reduction approach.

“Switzerland tried something,” said Liberal Senator Frank Mahovlich, the Hall of Fame former NHL player.

“They had a park and every drug addict in Switzerland came to Europe, so they had to stop that.”

But Campbell disputed the senator’s assertion, calling his comments “a myth.”

“You cannot have access to that supervised injection site unless you’re from that canton,” Campbell said. “If you’re in Zurich, you can’t go to another place and the reason for that is, as we know, they need the support of families and their friends. So that’s another myth. They didn’t go to Switzerland.”

“It did happen,” Mahovlich responded.

“It didn’t happen,” Campbell countered.

“It did happen,” Mahovlich insisted. “I was told it happened.

“Another problem was in the States,” he continued. “In 1957, I joined professional hockey and I used to go to Chicago. We’d go down the streets and they’d take us by skid row.

“Well, we were there … they put a highway through it and it wasn’t skid row anymore.”

Mahovlich’s colleagues didn’t comment on the senator’s assertions.