The Red Deer overdose prevention site. (Supplied)

By Josh Hall | @Vancan19

lawsuit puts closure up in the air

Injunction granted to maintain hours at Red Deer OPS as lawyer tries to prevent shutdown

Jan 16, 2025 | 5:40 PM

A judge has granted an injunction to revert Red Deer’s overdose prevention site (OPS) back to its original hours of operation.

Since it opened in October 2018 — in an Atco trailer on the same property as Safe Harbour Society, and across the street from Red Deer’s emergency homeless shelter — the OPS has been open 24 hours a day. But in recent weeks, Recovery Alberta, through a directive from the Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction, closed up shop from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.

This came in advance of the site’s planned permanent closure on April 1.

Last year, the ministry said it’d be closing the OPS after a request from Red Deer city council to replace it with other services.

The transition to those other services has begun, and they include recovery coaches, a mobile rapid access addiction medicine clinic, increased detox capacity, and dynamic overdose response teams, says Minister Dan Williams.

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At the time, however, it was not stated that hours would be cut ahead of the closure.

Then in November, the government was served with a lawsuit from lawyer Avnish Nanda — of Edmonton-based Nanda & Company, and on behalf of a Red Deer man — claiming that the closure of the OPS was against the man’s constitutional rights.

The provincial government’s affidavit in response is when it first came out that OPS hours would be gradually cut.

The aforementioned injunction was granted this past Monday, Jan. 13, after both parties presented to Court of King’s Bench Justice Gillian Marriott, as first reported by the CBC.

“My client, Aaron Brown, is a longtime resident of Red Deer. He worked in the [oil] patch, and during the slowdown around 2017, he was hit hard,” Nanda shared with rdnewsNOW on Brown’s behalf.

“He lost his house, lost custody of his kids, and he turned to opioids to get a release. Things descended for him to the point where his life began to revolve around finding and using opioids.”

Nanda notes that opioids found on the street today are, “super dangerous and toxic,” to the point where, “you don’t know if it may be your last time.”

Brown, who stated in an affidavit that he was first prescribed opioids in his teens to help with the pain of an injury sustained playing hockey, has overdosed many times and had resigned himself to dying that way, says Nanda.

But the OPS, a place where he could get safe supplies and be provided help, like Naloxone, in the case of an overdose, changed things, the lawyer adds.

“[Using the OPS] stabilized his opioid use, reduced the frequency and the amount he was using, and now he’s on a path to recovery and treatment,” Nanda states.

Brown came to Nanda in October when Minister Williams announced the OPS’ eventual closure.

“He said to me, ‘Without this, I’ll actually die. I have aspirations, family, and without this, it’ll make it hard to achieve those things.'”

As for Brown’s Charter rights, Nanda says the OPS’ closure is cruel and unusual, and discriminatory against a medical condition.

“The OPS allowed Aaron to get permanent housing, and he’s concerned that he will lose access to that because you can’t use drugs in that type of housing space,” says Nanda.

“Between a quarter and half of all OPS users in Red Deer use it during hours when Recovery Alberta was proposing to close it — from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.”

Recovery Alberta confirms to rdnewsNOW that the OPS is back to 24 hours a day as of Thursday, Jan. 16.

Minister Williams, meantime, says his government will be appealing the injunction.

“Courts should be reluctant to impose public policy and programming decisions on elected governments,” he says.

“Decisions relating to how taxpayer dollars should or should not be spent are supposed to be left in the hands of leaders who were elected with a democratic mandate and accountability to those they govern.”

Williams says he looks forward to, “the court fully considering the merits of our case at trial.”

Continues Nanda: “This is a precedent-setting case; it’s the first time a government is trying to shut down an SCS, and even after the site has demonstrated such effective help for people with substance use disorder.

“The evidence is two-fold, in that if you get rid of this service, more people will die and more people will be denied services; also, social disorder around public substance use will increase.”

The case returns to the Red Deer courthouse in March when Nanda will seek another injunction to prevent the April 1 shutdown. A full trial is slated for June.

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