BEXTE: Who will finally bulldoze the Nenshi-Gondek Drug Den?

"On my left, a coffee shop where kids waited with their mothers while a relative endured heart surgery inside the hospital. On my right, five men circled up on stolen bicycles, lighting a crack pipe."

Photo: View of "Crack Alley" the narco-wasteland that surrounds the Calgary Drop-In Centre.

Last summer I found myself walking past the Sheldon Chumir hospital in downtown Calgary, near the so-called “supervised consumption site” that Nenshi and Gondek foisted on the Beltline. I rarely come to this part of town anymore, mainly because it is where my gym was, and, truth be told, I was not exactly a regular. But there I was, caught in a scene that summed up the entire failure of Calgary’s drug policy.

On my left, a coffee shop where kids waited with their mothers while a relative endured heart surgery inside the hospital. On my right, five men circled up on stolen bicycles, lighting a crack pipe in broad daylight. Families trapped on the sidewalk, forced to walk past addiction and chaos in the open air.

I was in disbelief. And then came the punchline: a police cruiser pulled up beside me, stuck in traffic. I knocked on the window and asked if they saw what I saw. They looked, shrugged, and told me they were “on traffic duty.” That shrug, at open-air narcotics and at fear on children’s faces, is City Hall’s entire drug policy in one gesture.

This is the civic legacy of progressives who insisted that normalizing hard drug use was somehow “compassionate.” They know better. They have seen what happened in Vancouver, where the Downtown Eastside became a narco-wasteland, uninhabitable and deadly. But ideology comes first. Admitting their compassionate rhetoric was really a self-interested ruse would be too much. And so Calgary pays the price.

The Beltline suffers. The East Village suffers worse. The stabbings are relentless. The weapons confiscated in the tent city known as “Crack Alley” outside the Drop-In Centre make it an unlivable community for women, children, and frankly any man who does not want to get stabbed. The “safe consumption” site did not make the streets safer; it turned them into a showcase for disorder.

Now, finally, someone is willing to say it plainly. Sonya Sharp wants the Sheldon Chumir drug den shut down. Not studied. Not reviewed. Not “reimagined.” Closed. She also wants to end the dangerous practice of dumping every shelter bed and social service into one corner of the East Village, turning the Drop-In Centre into a magnet for chaos that the rest of downtown pays for in boarded-up shops and stab wounds.

And she is right. You cannot “revitalize downtown” while warehousing every social crisis on a single block. Calgary’s heart has been hollowed out by bureaucrats who cared more about optics than outcomes. Business owners are at their wits’ end, families avoid downtown after dark, and the police, when they are not writing traffic tickets, are babysitting the consequences of bad policy.

That does not mean the man down on his luck, the one who deserves help, should be abandoned. A father who worked two jobs, then lost his wife to cancer, then his home when debt crushed him, deserves a safe shelter. A rich country like Canada can and should provide a warm bed, a hot meal, and a chance to get back on his feet. But that man, virtuous, resilient, willing to work nights and mornings just to claw back stability, should not be forced to wade through fentanyl zombies and gangsters just to sleep. That is not compassion. It is cruelty dressed up in progressive language.

Critics will sneer and demand to know where services should go instead. But the answer is simple: addiction and homelessness are provincial responsibilities. The city’s job is to keep streets safe and businesses viable.

Contrast that with the dithering of Gondek and her allies. The choice before Calgarians is stark: more shrugs, or a city government that actually fights for order.

For too long, we have been told to simply tolerate open-air drug dens and unsafe streets in the name of “compassion.” But compassion without safety is hollow. We must refuse to make the same mistakes that turned Vancouver into a narco-cemetery. Calgary is better than that.

If this city wants to be strong again, it starts with bulldozing the Drop-In model, shutting down the Sheldon Chumir drug site, and reclaiming downtown for the families, workers, and shop owners who deserve more than shrugs.