Manitoba government offered plan for Indigenous-led supervised consumption site in Winnipeg

The province says it’s considering a community proposal for an Indigenous-led supervised consumption site in downtown Winnipeg.

The coalition behind the idea, led by Aboriginal Health and Wellness Centre, includes community partners Sunshine House, Ka Ni Kanichihk, Manitoba Harm Reduction Network, Main Street Project and Substance Consulting.

For more than a year, Sunshine House has been operating Manitoba’s only mobile overdose prevention site out of an RV near Main Street and the Disraeli Freeway, offering drug users a place to test their drugs and staff trained to respond to an overdose.

“It’s very exciting to be working in this type of landscape, where you have community support, a provincial government that’s really open to dialogue, to listening,” Sunshine House executive director Levi Foy told CBC News on Tuesday.

However, he said, “we need to be moving faster … We know that things are getting worse, there’s a lot more challenges facing our communities.”

Preliminary data from the province’s chief medical examiner suggests 355 Manitobans died of suspected overdoses between January and October in 2023, 63 short of 2022’s record of 418.

Bernadette Smith’s mandate as the minister of housing, addictions and homelessness is to establish the province’s first supervised consumption site in Winnipeg.

In an emailed statement to CBC News, she said: “We are carefully considering the proposal from Aboriginal Health and Wellness Centre and community partners as a solution to help our relatives on their journey to recovery.”

‘Drug toxicity is increasing’

Foy says the group hopes to get more money to keep Sunshine House’s overdose prevention RV going five days a week. However, their ideal goal is a permanent supervised consumption site near Higgins Avenue and Main Street in Winnipeg’s core.

“It’s very clear through the 250 visits per day that we get that we need something there, and it’s also very clear that the services that we’re providing are very, very clearly only a stopgap,” Foy said.

“Right now, we’re all doing this at the side of our desk, so it would be great if we had project managers and people who could dedicate 35 to 40 hours a week just to really get the ball rolling on this.”

Sunshine House, a Winnipeg-based organization, has operated an overdose prevention site out of an RV since October of 2022. (Alana Cole/CBC)

The harm reduction RV received a federal exemption in Oct. 2022 under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to operate in Winnipeg’s downtown, West End, North End and Point Douglas communities.

The community drop-in and resource centre scrambled together about $375,000 last year to keep the RV rolling until the end of March, after its funding agreement with Health Canada for the mobile site was expected to dry up by the end of October.

Foy says operational funding from the city is unlikely, which means a mix of funding from the province plus private and public donors is Sunshine House’s last option.

The mobile site has been seeing “sustained high numbers” and the community needs to know whether or not the service will continue to be offered beyond July 1st, he said.

‘We could really create something unique’

There are also some services that cannot be provided out of an RV. They require a mix of clinical and community-based services proposed by the coalition.

“Ideally, we would like to enhance our services, because the drug toxicity is increasing,” Foy said. “We’re working in a very confined space in a very uncontrolled environment.”

An online form asking people to show support for the coalition’s proposal has reached about 700 signatures, according to Foy.

“If we all come together collaboratively and in tandem, we could really create something unique, beautiful and Indigenous-led.”