A First Nation located near Calgary is next in line to receive an addiction treatment facility, after the signing of a memorandum of understanding.
Midday Wednesday, Tsuut’ina Chief Roy Whitney was joined by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Minister of Addictions and Mental Health Dan Williams to sign the MOU for a 75-bed facility on First Nation lands.
Whitney said the facility is needed given the modern landscape of street drugs.
“In this generation, we are dealing not just with alcohol or soft drugs. We are dealing with synthetic opioids that are cheap and easy to conceal and incredibly powerful. This is the new and more difficult reality,” the chief said.
The agreement between the province and First Nation for up to $30 million in capital funding. It follows up on an election announcement made by the UCP in May for 11 facilities, including one at nearby Siksika Nation.
Enoch Cree Nation and Kainai Nation already have similar projects underway.
Smith and Williams are expected to sign a similar MOU with Siksika Chief Ouray Crowfoot on Thursday in Calgary.
“This partnership reflects our government’s unwavering commitment to working together with First Nations to increase addiction treatment capacity across Alberta,” Smith said while wearing a ribbon skirt. “Building this recovery community in partnership with Tsuut’ina is another essential step towards ending the addiction crisis here in Alberta.”
Smith claimed the federal government “abdicated” its responsibility in the area after “significantly decreasing” supports for addiction and health care.
Indigenous Services Canada said the federal government has committed year-over-year increases of funding for Indigenous mental health, wellness, and substance use treatment and prevention.
“Danielle Smith and (Conservative Party of Canada Leader) Pierre Poilievre are choosing to further entrench the stigma that Indigenous peoples face as they play politics with the mental health of Indigenous communities. That’s a new low,” Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu said in a statement.
“Pierre Poilievre and Danielle Smith want to take us back to a war on drugs approach. I invite them to leave the political bubble, go on the ground and actually listen to the needs of Indigenous communities.”
Williams acknowledged that while the impacts of drug poisoning and addiction have been felt province-wide, Indigenous communities have been hit particularly hard.
“They disproportionately represent those in crisis in addiction in the province of Alberta,” the minister said.
The new “recovery community” will have “holistic” programming that includes ways of healing that draw on Indigenous culture and traditions.
“The whole addictions and opioid crisis really affects one’s spirit,” Jodi Two Guns, Tsuut’ina’s executive director of wellness, said. “That’s the main thing: that we bring them back to the land and then we call upon our own spiritual leaders and ceremonies, ways of life to allow our clients to have that way of healing as well.
“So it will be like a hybrid treatment centre, where we have the Western ways as well as our own traditional ways.”
“It gives an opportunity for homeless people to find a place where they can recover and help them get off the streets,” Whitney said. “We need to be able to support our people, it doesn’t matter where they are.”
Williams said he expected construction in Tsuut’ina to begin early next year with completion “soon after that.”
The province expects construction on the Enoch Cree facility to open next year and construction is underway at Kainai.
Smith said the province was four years into an eight-year recovery-focused strategy and deflected criticisms on the province’s approach that diminishes the use of supervised consumption sites – criticism leveled by professionals like former Indigenous Wellness Core lead Dr. Esther Tailfeathers.
“This is the reason why our recovery-oriented system of care is not being led by Alberta Health Services. Our recovery-oriented system of care is being led by (the ministry of) mental health and addiction. It’s being led, as well, out of my office by my chief of staff, who is an expert in the recovery-oriented system of care approach,” Smith said.
“We have not closed safe consumption sites. What we are doing is we are augmenting that with a recovery-oriented approach that has shown some promise in places like Massachusetts and Portugal. And we’re going to continue down that pathway.”
The Alberta NDP released a joint statement from their Indigenous relations critic Brooks Arcand-Paul and Janet Eremenko, their mental health and addictions critic, calling on the government to “acknowledge” the current approach “isn’t working.”
“A reduction in life expectancy among Indigenous people of seven years is unacceptable in 2023,” the statement said. “Premier Smith putting her head in the sand over evidence-based harm reduction strategies is not only deeply disappointing, it’s dangerous.”
April 2023 marked the deadliest month for toxic drug fatalities on record at 179, marking 613 deaths province-wide in the first four months of 2023.
–with files from Paula Tran, Global News