WINTRUP: How close is too close for consumption site? Winnipeggers want to know

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Winnipeg Sun’s Marty Gold broke the news late in 2024 of the Province of Manitoba’s first supervised safe consumption site being proposed near Argyle Alternative School in the Winnipeg School Division in the South Point Douglas neighbourhood.

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The public is now considering the compatibility of safe consumption sites within 60 metres of schools — the length of an NHL ice sheet – well within an easy walking distance. This would be equivalent to a safe consumption site at the southwest corner of Westminster Avenue and Langside Street in proximity to Balmoral Hall School, or a safe consumption site at Corydon Community Centre near River Heights School on Grosvenor Avenue. Either someone at the provincial government thinks safe consumption sites 200 feet from schools are great, or did not think this through at all.

Supervised safe consumption sites are currently legal in Canada. Approved sites are exempted by the federal government under Health Canada’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Users bring their own illegal drugs to inject, snort, inhale or swallow in the presence of trained staff. The first safe consumption site in North America opened in 2003 in Vancouver. In 2022, there were approximately 120 legally sanctioned supervised safe consumption sites operating in eleven countries around the globe. Alberta and Saskatchewan each have safe consumptions sites: Saskatoon’s is 172 metres from a school, Edmonton’s is 327 metres from a school and Calgary’s is 548 metres from a school.

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The small number of safe consumption sites has generated little to no academic research regarding where safe consumption sites should not be located. The federal government provides no regulations or guidelines on where not to locate safe consumption sites. There is a more rigorous and fulsome process outlined by the federal government for siting new cell towers compared to siting new safe consumption sites. The Province of Ontario has been the prominent jurisdiction recently banning safe consumption sites within 200 metres of schools and childcare centres, causing five safe consumption sites in Toronto to close.

There has been some research on where safe consumption sites should be located — in a manner to reduce barriers to access for the drug users: long travel times, limited operating hours and overcrowding will deter drug users from accessing the safe consumption site.

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Safe consumption sites, if permitted, should be implemented as low-barrier programs to encourage use and located where drug users continuously gather. But how close should safe consumption sites be located to schools and childcare facilities?

Argyle Alternative School is for 180 students in grades 10-12, up to the age of 21 and has been at its current location since 1896 and in the current building since 1952. The next closest school is a 20 minute walk to the north, Gonzaga Middle School on Maple Street North. Kookum’s Place Infant Centre is a non-profit centre, licensed for 49 children ages three months to age six located on Higgins Avenue within 167 metres of the safe consumption site. One would expect, and hope, the students and daycare attendees are also not users of the safe consumption site, thus close proximity to each other is not a necessity.

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Much city planning thought has gone into where schools should be located to benefit the health of students, going back several decades. Clarence A. Perry in 1926 conceived a city planning concept, the Neighbourhood Unit, placing elementary schools in a centrally located green with other neighbourhood civic amentias all encircled by residential land-uses. This idea carries forward today as schools are planned in locations to be easily accessible to students, near residential, and co-located with amenities used by student aged children and families.

Other land-uses seen as compatible with schools are daycares, playing fields, parks, public libraries, recreational centres and senior centres. Good judgment and zoning regulations have ensured schools are not located near obnoxious or toxic uses that produce high volumes of fumes, dust, noise, or odours. No guidelines suggest schools should be located near a health facility such as a hospital, never mind a safe consumption site. Winnipeg’s nearest school to a hospital is Mulvey School, built in 1925, about 100 metres from Misericordia Health Centre which was established in 1899.

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The City of Winnipeg has long taken steps to have proximity regulations for incompatible land-uses near schools such as ‘Adult Service or Entertainment Establishments’ not allowed within 325 metres of schools, place of worships and parks; X-Rated Stores face the same restriction and cannabis production facilities aren’t allowed within about 100 metres of schools, dwelling units and parks. Such regulations provide certainty to the community of what cannot occur near schools and allow these businesses to plan the best sites for their facilities.

Mitigating the impacts of incompatible land-uses has long been one of the major genesis for land use planning since the Industrial Revolution when heavy industrial uses invaded residential areas of pastoral towns and villages. The original solution was to place incompatible land-uses physically apart in separate locations. Each community decides on a case-by-case situation what the separation distance shall be, going through its own self-analysis of risk assessment, and consider the probability and severity of an adverse effect due to a hazard, to establish the setback distances between incompatible uses.

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Common sense has prevailed in the past to separate clearly obviously incomparable land-uses, and some regulations have been instilled to ensure proximity is well defined for the public knowledge. Proponents in Winnipeg promoting safe consumption sites should now tell the community, what is the acceptable setback from schools and childcare centres for new safe consumption sites?

Perhaps start off by telling us, how close to their kids, nieces, nephews and grandkids schools and daycares will they be accepting the next safe consumption site? Is it less than 60 metres? Speak clearly so the students, support staff, teachers and parents at all of Winnipeg’s schools can hear your answer.

— John Wintrup is a lifelong Winnipegger, urbanist, globetrotting city explorer, Harvard student, and professional planner with a M.Sc. Planning degree and holder of multiple planning accreditations in both Canada and the United States.

Have thoughts on what’s going on in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada or across the world? Send us a letter to the editor at wpgsun.letters@kleinmedia.ca

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