It worked out to a minimum of 672 people deployed to forty-two intersections. Then, to move everybody, Townsend rented fourteen school buses. “The logistics became gigantic,” he remarks.
It had already been more than twenty-four hours since any of them had slept. Townsend, Fader, and Wilson had stayed up all night preparing little activist goody bags that their volunteers would hand out to people who were stuck in their cars in the massive traffic jam PHS intended to create. Each of these bags contained a flower, a lollipop, and a pamphlet that explained Insite and how the injection facility was at risk of being shut down.
“We’re sorry that we’re blocking traffic today,” the front page read. “But it’s a matter of life and death.”
Would anybody show up to help the gang hand them out?
At noon on August 17, hundreds of people did. As those mysterious fliers had instructed, they gathered in a parking lot adjacent to the convention centre. There, Townsend and Fader explained what it was that everybody was going to be doing, and then told everybody to climb on board a bus. From the convention centre, each bus was assigned to travel to three drop-off points. (The drivers were told they would be helping with an act of civil disobedience and Townsend remembers that not one of them balked, even when Toronto police began to take an interest. “I find that people quite enjoy the chance to feel like they can make a positive change,” he says.)
In downtown Toronto, Bloor Street and Queen Street run parallel, east to west, about fifteen blocks apart from one another. It was along these two major arterials that Townsend had mapped two primary groups of intersections they would block off.
Secondary lines of intersections were plotted on streets running immediately to the north and to the south of Bloor and Queen, making for six parallel lines total. Those secondary protests wouldn’t attract as much attention, but they would prevent anyone stuck in the main traffic jams on Bloor and Queen streets from having any hope of exiting onto side streets. When everyone was deployed at the exact same time, it would be impossible for traffic to move anywhere; there would be gridlock in every direction.
Just before two p.m., nearly 700 volunteers were in position at forty-two intersections throughout downtown Toronto. To coordinate the traffic shutdown, Fader had purchased dozens of cheap wristwatches and performed the tedious task of setting them all to the exact same time.
“It was totally like an old-school spy drama,” she says. “But we had to be really on it. I remember telling the driver on my bus, ‘Can you get through there and speed up!? Oh no, now you’ve got to slow down!’”
When all those hour-hands struck two p.m., everyone moved from the holding positions they had taken on the sidewalks into their assigned intersections. Then banners were unwrapped and draped across all four crosswalks at each of them.
“Hundreds will die if safe injection site closes,” some of them read.
Others carried a simpler message: “Insite saves lives.”
With the banners held high, pairs of volunteers walked out from each intersection in all four directions, politely handing out the goody bags that contained an explanation of what all the fuss was about.
PHS was in every direction. Two days earlier, Townsend had hired five people to cover the city with posters that similarly called for a defence of Insite. Thousands of posters—tens of thousands, Townsend swears—covered every telephone pole and spare inch of wall space in downtown Toronto.
Now traffic ground to a halt and hundreds of drivers around the city pressed on their horns at once. Meanwhile, helicopters circled overhead to capture the chaos for that evening’s news. Then an airplane flew between them, towing a sign behind it. “Support injection sites,” it read.
Wilson remembers laughing when he saw that. “I was really fucked up on dope,” he says. To fend off withdrawal, Wilson had found an Ontario doctor who prescribed him Dilaudid, a synthetic opioid also known as hydromorphone. It’s a powerful drug, and Wilson says that day he might have underestimated it. “I remember being in the middle of fucking Bloor Street and seeing nothing but people and stopped cars,” Wilson says. “We had literally brought Toronto to a standstill. And then Mark had this plane flying around.”
Amidst all the chaos, Bond fondly recalls the smirk that crept across Townsend’s face. Sitting at the front of one bus across the aisle from each other, Townsend looked to him. “It sounds like it’s working,” he shouted over the horns.
Less than five minutes later, the Portland’s hundreds of volunteers left the intersections they occupied and traffic resumed. It was a very short protest by design. Townsend emphasizes that the idea was to build support, and holding people in traffic quickly works against that goal. They created a very strong visual—an entire city swept up in one cause—and that is what politicians saw on television that night and in the papers the following morning.
“All that was really just for the prime minister and Tony Clement,” Townsend says. “It was to make them think, ‘My god, these guys have got a lot of reach and a lot of support.’”
There was a round of drinks on a downtown patio and then they returned to the hotel, managing to stay up just long enough to watch themselves on the evening news. Almost immediately after, everybody fell asleep.
“We had pulled it off,” Bond says.
Ottawa got the message. Public opinion was behind Insite, or at least it looked like it was in Toronto that weekend. Canada’s new Conservative health minister caved, begrudgingly.
Insite’s initial exemption from federal drug laws was scheduled to expire on September 12, 2006. On September 11, the Portland received a fax. Health Canada had granted Insite a second exemption that would run until December 31, 2007.
PHS had won that battle but was shaken.
Liz Evans remembers the September 2006 exemption as a very mixed blessing. It allowed Insite to remain open for another year, but also made it clear that Insite’s fate was beyond the control of PHS. As long as an injection facility required federal permission to operate, Ottawa could shut it down. And the government of the day had signalled that that is what it intended to do.
“At that point, we knew that the writing was on the wall,” she says.
Evans, Townsend, Dan Small, Kerstin Stuerzbecher, and Tom Laviolette debated what to do. A possible solution did emerge, but one with huge risks.
If the legal framework in which Insite existed left it at the mercy of Ottawa, PHS could try to change that arrangement. If the law said that the federal government could close an injection facility in Vancouver, PHS could take aim at that law. They could challenge the system in court.
PHS had opened Insite through a back door. It began as an experiment that academics were evaluating. The original exemption from federal drug laws that Insite received in 2003 actually refers to drug users as “research subjects.” If PHS asked the courts whether or not an injection site was legal on its own, the courts could find that it was not, that Insite was, in fact, in violation of the law and must close forever.
The Portland’s management team weighed this decision for months. Small and Stuerzbecher were in favour of going to court, but Evans and Townsend were reluctant.
Stuerzbecher says she always felt a legal battle was inevitable. “For me, it was more of a question of when we were going to trigger it,” she explains. “I always thought that in order to truly enshrine it, we had to do that. Because you can’t rely on governments.”
Small felt the same way. “There was danger, because you can lose, and then you lose big,” he remembers thinking. “But there was no other way.”
Small convinced Townsend, then Townsend convinced Evans and finally pulled the trigger. “We don’t have a choice,” Evans remembers Townsend telling her.
Shelly Tomic knew she was addicted to drugs. She was injecting speed several times a day and recognized that the habit was beyond her control. At the same time, she had limits and there were things she promised herself she would never do. “I always looked down o
n people who would dig,” she says.
Injecting opioids causes many people to experience a mild need to scratch themselves. It’s not necessarily an unpleasant sensation. Some addicts describe it as a comforting feeling that lets them know that they are high. But over time, an addict’s compulsion to gently scratch themselves can turn into picking. It’s one reason why injection-drug users sometimes have open wounds or scabs. Tomic had sworn that she would never pick at herself.
“I always thought, ‘If I ever get that bad, shoot me first,’” she says. “And then I had this moment. I was sitting on my bed, and it was like, suddenly I was across the room looking at myself and there I was. I was that person there with blood all over them. And I just dropped the needle down, and I cried until I fell asleep.
“I was about eleven. Eleven or twelve,” she adds. “I grew up really fast … It was at that moment that I made a conscious decision to keep using.”
A sworn affidavit written and signed by Tomic states that she was born in July 1968, already addicted to methamphetamine. “My mother was addicted to speed when she was pregnant with me, so I was born addicted, too,” it reads. “I have a nearly life-long history of drug use,” the document continues. “My first experience with illegal drugs occurred when I was seven years old. A close relative injected me with speed. I continued to use speed throughout my childhood.”
Tomic arrived in the Downtown Eastside when she was thirteen or fourteen. Six or seven years later, in 1988 or 1989, she began to inject cocaine. “I got hooked quickly and became a regular user,” the affidavit says. “While I was injecting cocaine, it was not uncommon for me to fix several dozen times a day. To get the money I needed to buy cocaine, I turned tricks in the Downtown Eastside.”
One day in 1994 or 1995, she bought what she thought was a flap of cocaine, but which was actually heroin. “Heroin became my drug of choice from then on,” she says.
Tomic’s affidavit paints two pictures: one before Insite opened and one after. “You feel unsafe in the alleys,” it reads. “They are dirty. You can’t get clean equipment or rigs to prepare the drugs or inject them. Also, you feel under the pressure to inject as fast as possible, in case the police bust you and take your stuff. There is no time to find a good place to inject or to test your drugs to find out how strong they [are]. So, you just jam your fix into yourself wherever you can find a vein, as fast as possible, and try to get out of the alley. The problem is that if the drugs are really potent or if there is something wrong with them, you overdose and no one is there to help you. Over the years, I have seen an uncountable number [of] people go unconscious from overdoses in the alleys.”
After Insite opened, Tomic stopped using drugs on the street. “While I was using heroin, I found that I stopped getting abscesses as soon as I started to fix at Insite,” the affidavit continues. “I never had a single needle from Insite break off while I was injecting, and I never had an overdose there. It is a lot less stressful to inject at Insite than it is in the alleys because there is no pressure on you to be fast. You can take your time, make sure your skin is clean, find a good vein, test your drugs, and go slowly. I found that, because I knew that I could inject at Insite any time they were open, I usually used less when I fixed. When you know that Insite is there and you can go in and inject pretty much whenever you need to, you don’t feel that you need to binge to get your high.”
Tomic was one of three plaintiffs named in a lawsuit against the Attorney General of Canada. Townsend recalls that it was a complicated task to select individual plaintiffs who would best represent the population that would be harmed by a federal decision to close Insite. “The sad reality of it was, we had to try to pick people who we didn’t think were going to die,” he says. Townsend explains that they expected the court case to drag on for years, and the people whom Insite helped the most were drug addicts who faced extreme marginalization and therefore were often in very poor health. “And we had to pick people who were passionate and who believed in this,” he adds. “Those were the two criteria.”
When Insite opened, Tomic was intensely sceptical. She was one of the regulars at VANDU’s illegal injection site at 327 Carrall Street. She liked that it was run by users and didn’t trust a facility operated by the establishment. “Everybody thought that there was going to be cameras,” Tomic recalls. “I thought, ‘This is bullshit.’”
Then she participated in a couple of consultation groups that PHS organized with users in the neighbourhood. The idea of Insite began to sound alright to her. Then it opened and Tomic began to rely on the place for support, not just physically but mentally and emotionally as well.
“I would go on in there, and I’d be on a rant or a rave,” she remembers. “And they would never shake their heads at me or look different at me. They would say, ‘Okay, let’s go talk. What do you need from me?’ And more than half the time—two-thirds of the time—I would go, ‘I don’t know. Just what you’re doing.’ And then I’d walk out crying because I was flustered. And they would stay with me.”
Townsend remembers that Tomic was immediately willing to be a plaintiff. “We asked her one day and she said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it.’”
The second plaintiff in the Insite case was the facility’s operator, PHS Community Services Society (the legal name for the Portland Hotel Society). The third was Dean Wilson.
Wilson recounts that Small called one day and asked if he’d meet him for a coffee. Wilson asked him if he could find a twenty-dollar bill in it for him. Small said sure, he could, and the two met at a café.
“Look, I’ve got a question I’ve got to ask you,” Small said to him. “We’re going to have to do a preventive lawsuit here because they are trying to shut us down.”
Wilson’s response: “I’m in.”
Then he got up, left the café, and used the twenty to buy cocaine. “I went and scored and that was it,” Wilson remembers.
While flippant about his decision to join the lawsuit, Wilson immediately became its most vocal advocate. As the case slowly wound its way to the Supreme Court of Canada over the next four years, he was the voice for the thousands of people addicted to drugs who in literal ways depended on Insite for their survival.
“It was a constant struggle on all different fronts,” he says.
On August 17, 2007, Tomic, Wilson, and PHS entered their legal challenge into the Supreme Court of British Columbia.
At issue was the application of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) and, more specifically, Section 4 and Section 56. Section 4 prohibits possession and trafficking. Section 56 states that Canada’s health minister can “exempt any person, class of persons, controlled substance or precursor of a controlled substance from the application of the CDSA.”
According to the plaintiff’s statement of claim—the document that’s filed in court to initiate a legal challenge—“It is unknown whether the Minister will renew the existing exemption or provide another exemption for Insite to operate.”
If Insite was forced to close because the health minister refused to grant Insite an exemption from the CDSA, it continues, “Wilson, Tomic, and other users will face a risk of death or serious harm to their physical and mental health. In particular, Wilson and Tomic will face increased risks of overdose, infection, decline in their mental and psychological well-being, and other health-related complications from drug use.”
The court could not allow that to happen, the document argues, because doing so would be in violation of Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which gives every citizen (and non-citizen) a “right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”
The health minister’s refusal to grant Insite an exemption from federal drug laws would violate Wilson, Tomic, and every Insite client’s rights to life, liberty, and security of the person, according to the lawsuit.
PHS also included an argument on the basi
s of jurisdiction. It maintained that in Canada, health care is a provincial responsibility. If the federal government interfered in how BC delivered a health-care service (in this case, supervising injection drug use), Ottawa would be exceeding its jurisdictional authority over the provinces.
On the Section 7 arguments, the judge saw obvious commonalities with the case that VANDU and Pivot had brought to the same court a year earlier, seeking to end prohibition. And so the two were granted an application to be heard together.
VANDU’s lawyer, John Conroy, says this likely had advantages for PHS. “Our argument was that the problem was outside of Insite, not inside Insite,” Conroy says. “That [prohibition] is not only disrupting the health of the individual addict but causing a health problem in the community.”
That more radical argument made Insite’s case look more reasonable by comparison, he explains. “They liked the fact that we were taking a more extreme position than them, which is always tactically interesting,” Conroy says.
Notably absent from the case was the regional authority that funded Insite on behalf of the province: Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH). It was a huge setback. If the health authority had signed on alongside PHS, they would have had the provincial government’s power and resources behind them.
Heather Hay, the health-authority director who had worked with PHS to establish Insite, says that within Vancouver Coastal Health, the injection facility was simply not a priority. “We didn’t jump in initially, and it was very challenging to get our legal counsel on board,” she says.
For the time being, PHS was on its own. Small, who was involved in strategizing the case and who helped with research, recognized that Hay was in their corner, but today is still angry when asked about Vancouver Coastal Health’s refusal to help PHS. “The health board said, ‘No way, we’re not going to do it. And we don’t want you to do it. And we’re not paying for anything. We’re not giving you any help,’” Small says. “They made it really hard.”
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