Juno News - April 01, 2025


Liberal policies continue to fuel addiction & crime

Topics
safe injection sites
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Greater Victoria Allen Gardens Mark Carney Homelessness Riverdale Carleton Surrey
Liberal candidate apologizes for China bounty comments Liberal MP who made China bounty comments steps down

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

132.98

Word count

1,137

Sentence count

66

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Safe injection sites have flourished in Toronto, Vancouver, and other major cities across the country. They are supposed to help people who are in need of a safe place to get a clean needle to inject, but in reality, they encourage more crime.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 This is Street Health on Dundas Street East in downtown Toronto.
00:00:05.880 It is one of the first harm reduction sites licensed by the federal government under Justin Trudeau's leadership.
00:00:15.400 It's quiet here today, but on an ordinary day in nice weather, you'll see people hanging out.
00:00:22.020 The drug dealers usually park themselves down the street, going into stores down the street.
00:00:27.500 The problem with the drug enabling sites is that they not only draw illegal drug dealers,
00:00:33.980 these sites encourage people to take their poisons and kill them one step at a time.
00:00:40.100 Unfortunately, between the Liberal government and the drug activists, these sites have flourished in Toronto.
00:00:50.420 There are nine sites scattered throughout mostly the downtown.
00:00:55.060 And in the summer, or in the nicer weather, you can hear people screaming as they come out,
00:01:01.620 having been injected with their favourite poison.
00:01:04.920 Another well-known site in Toronto is on Victoria Street, right near Dundas Square,
00:01:12.240 or the newly named Sankova Square, and Ryerson University, the newly named Metropolitan University.
00:01:19.500 They're mostly licensed in Vancouver.
00:01:22.840 They started in Vancouver in the 2000s and then started up in Toronto in the middle of around 2014.
00:01:34.260 The federal government felt quite happy with encouraging these consumption sites.
00:01:40.600 The drug activists say they keep people safe.
00:01:42.720 I say that they just encourage drug addiction even further, and all the crime that goes along with it.
00:01:50.640 I'll tell you a funny story.
00:01:51.860 In this particular neck of the woods, I wrote about this a couple of years ago,
00:01:56.420 and the poverty pimps, as I call them, the poverty industry, put up signs around this area of Cabbage Town,
00:02:04.420 calling me a bigot for calling out the safe injection sites.
00:02:09.120 There's nothing safe about them.
00:02:11.040 All they're doing is giving people a clean needle and injecting them again with their poisons.
00:02:16.620 And we can be very thankful to the Liberal government under Justin Trudeau for bringing these crazy sites to us.
00:02:27.080 If Mark Carney is elected, we can expect these sites to be perpetuated.
00:02:33.140 I do know that the Poliev, the Conservative government, is looking at reducing them and ending them entirely. 0.94
00:02:40.760 So, okay, let me call somebody else.
00:02:42.660 No, what are you calling? Who are you calling?
00:02:46.620 And this is an example of the drug activists.
00:02:50.700 They like to keep things very secretive.
00:02:52.740 I don't know what they have to hide, but this happens repeatedly when one goes in front of a drug injection, safe injection site.
00:03:00.500 They don't want to be bothered by any public scrutiny, even though these are all publicly funded.
00:03:07.900 Let me repeat, publicly funded by the Liberal government, and they have been for years.
00:03:13.780 And they seem to be more concerned about protecting the clients than being accountable for the public dollars that they receive.
00:03:24.380 In Riverdale, as our viewers may or may not recall, a poor, innocent mother was shot by a drug dealer outside the drug injection site there.
00:03:37.660 And that kind of has been forgotten.
00:03:42.480 People have very short memories.
00:03:44.420 But that's the way things go, thanks to our Liberal government.
00:03:48.940 With the corner of Girard and Carleton, and I want to show you behind me in Allen Gardens the longest running encampment,
00:03:57.360 which is populated largely with, as you can see, Indigenous tents.
00:04:03.760 The Indigenous cause was brought to you by the Liberal government that had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
00:04:12.900 and now virtually anybody who identifies as Indigenous can do pretty much what they want,
00:04:20.080 including camping out in a downtown park, and, I might add, lighting fires, even though it is a park.
00:04:28.620 They call them sacred fires.
00:04:31.140 This park has been a real problem in downtown Toronto, but rest assured, there are many other parks that are populated by encampments,
00:04:41.220 and as the weather gets nicer, it'll get worse, and worse, and worse.
00:04:45.480 Homelessness is a huge problem right across Canada, one that has been virtually ignored by the Liberal government. 0.98
00:04:53.520 It's a hard one to solve, but to allow the homeless to camp out in our downtown parks is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.
00:05:03.920 There's a lot of money going into the homeless industry here in Toronto and in other areas right across Canada. 0.70
00:05:12.460 In Vancouver, where safe injection sites first started, they have allowed the homeless and drug addicts to camp out on the street,
00:05:23.460 on the sidewalk, in makeshift tents in east side Vancouver.
00:05:28.620 It's a blight. It's an absolute blight.
00:05:31.200 B.C.'s toxic, unregulated drug supply claimed the lives of 152 British Columbians in January, nearly five deaths per day.
00:05:40.420 According to the B.C. Coroner's Service, three of those deaths were children and youth.
00:05:45.200 While the numbers are trending down, toxic drug deaths are on the rise in several communities in the Fraser Health and Interior Health regions.
00:05:53.580 Vancouver, Surrey, and Greater Victoria have seen the highest number of deaths from toxic drugs so far this year.
00:05:59.860 Your politicians will say, and particularly the Liberal politicians will say, that people are homeless, that they're poor, that they're living paycheck to paycheck, and that is indeed true.
00:06:11.780 But a lot of the homeless that I've studied over the years are essentially drug addicts.
00:06:17.640 They don't want to go into shelter.
00:06:20.140 They don't want to go inside because they want to be able to take their drugs without any sort of scrutiny.
00:06:26.860 Even the shelters that have allowed harm reduction, the safe injection philosophy, are not being populated by some of these people because, I don't know, they prefer to live in parks and nobody's stopping them. 0.84
00:06:42.120 It is actually illegal to live in a park, to camp out in a park, but our left governments have allowed the homeless and the drug addicts to set up the tent wherever they want.
00:06:58.120 And in fact, enable them by bringing in porta-potties, picking up the garbage, that sort of thing.
00:07:04.800 We as Canadians have to say, enough is enough.
00:07:09.380 It's crazy what has been allowed to fester on the streets of our major cities.
00:07:18.940 Toronto is no exception.
00:07:21.500 And I would say that it has really declined because of the drug addicts, because of the homelessness,
00:07:28.820 because our politicians are turning a blind eye to the homelessness.
00:07:33.060 You can rest assured that this encampment will only get worse as the weather gets better.
00:07:41.980 And last summer, the entire park was populated with tents, and nobody will stop them.
00:07:48.380 When I think of all the people who are being patriotic about Canada,
00:07:53.900 and I think about their fighting back against the tariffs in the states,
00:08:00.720 I say, my response is, I'm a proud Canadian, but I'm not proud of what our country has become.
00:08:07.060 And this is just evidence of what our country has become, how it's declined, and there are no standards.
00:08:15.280 For True North, I'm Sue Ann Levy.
00:08:17.700 Thank you.