The day after Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre vowed to shut down Canada’s overdose prevention sites if elected prime minister, Sarah Blyth went to work as usual at Vancouver’s OPS, the first such site in Canada, which has been saving lives since 2016.

In a business-as-usual day, the centre will have more than 600 visits, reverse two possibly fatal overdoses, host a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, steer at least one visitor to recovery, and much, much more.

Some days are busier. On April 9 four people headed into treatment.

“We’re saving lives every day,” says Blyth, now executive director, who started the OPS in 2016 in a nearby alley with a single tent, a can of naloxone and a chair. “To shut our overdose prevention site down would be, well, it would be terrible, and people would die.”

Yet that was the clear goal spelled out by Poilievre April 6 when he told a New Westminster news conference that a Conservative government “will be shutting down drug dens.

“We will ban drug dens within 500 metres of schools, hospitals, daycares playgrounds and other places where the community is vulnerable,” he said. “These drug consumption sites do not work.”

Yet not only is the evidence overwhelming that prevention sites do work, the Vancouver experience demonstrates that a facility run by the users or recovered users may be the best ways to begin journey from addiction to recovery.

The Conservative’s strategy is very simple. An exemption under Section 56(1) of the Canada Health Act would be allowed to expire on September 30, ending key legal protections for staff and visitors at a site.

Blyth was a manager of the Downtown Eastside Street Market in 2016 when she began to see the impact of fentanyl on the drug supply.

“We were outside running the street market, and there were people coming to us,” she remembers. “There were overdoses happening everywhere, all the time, and people would just run to us, and say ‘there’s a person overdosed in an alley.’ The problem with people overdosing in an alley is that if you wait a few minutes, they're going to have brain damage, you know, they're likely going to die.”

Insite, the nearby supervised injection site, was already at capacity. Users who smoked their drugs could not use Insite at all.

“Unless you were on the front lines, it was really hard for people to understand how many people were coming to us with overdoses. All of a sudden, we're running down every alley and it was like, ‘what the hell is going on? What the hell is this? Why is this happening?’

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“Eventually people would say, well, instead of that, could you just watch me use. And it just kind of went from, okay, we'll just put a table here and have a guy there. And there are three overdoses a day in the alley here, and people dying, too.”

The first months of OPS were organized on a grassroots basis, and funded on a GoFundMe model. Media coverage increased. A non-profit was created, and a storefront was rented to provide a sheltered place.

Vancouver OPS now occupies space on both sides of Hastings, with the consumption site on the north side with a covered outdoor inhalation space.

An office, donated food storage, second-hand clothes, and many other resources are on the south side of the street, including meeting space for daily Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Users can get a haircut, basic dental care, first aid, cosmetic supplies and, most importantly, a connection.

Since 2016, the organization has grown steadily. Today more than 86 trained volunteers and five staff provide a range of services to keep the centre open and safe, nineteen hours a day, seven days a week. The centre has seen one fatal overdose in all that time. The annual budget, including rent, is under $1 million a year, most provided by Vancouver Coastal Heath.

The hiring process provides its own road to recovery.

“We have people who are on the street, who are homeless, who come in and they say, I want a job, I want a routine,” Blyth explains. “It's basically volunteer pre-employment work. We say, come on in, come in every day. You can sweep. If they show up every day and they show up on time, then they can be trained to be on the front line and eventually they can move up.

“We only hire people from the community and former people from the community. Not only are they the best people to help each other, because they go because they go back into their housing with their expertise, but it gives people a chance to get into a routine and get a job.

“We work with people to get a resume. Okay, you don't have a resume? Let's work on a resume. Let's work on getting your ID back. Let's work on getting, you know, criminal charges removed.”

In time, Blyth says, “they get to the point where they go, you know what, I feel good. I’ve got a resume, I’ve got a reference, I’ve got housing, I’ve got a haircut. I’m healthy enough to go to detox, to be successful.”

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Blyth is particularly proud of the Recovery Navigator program, which opens the door to treatment and recovery for those who want to walk through. The three navigators are there to help those who say, “I’ve had enough, I’m done.”

Then, Blyth says, the navigator “starts calling, start arranging appointments, they talk to whoever it takes to get them into St. Paul’s or detox. We help people with every kind of emergency you can imagine. When they’ve done their detox, they have to get into recovery, which is another whole plan.

“It's difficult when a person's on the street or homeless or maybe sometimes doesn’t have a phone.”

This work could all end on September 30 if Poilievre’s Conservatives win the election.

Since 2016, overdose prevention sites have been created in every province except Newfoundland.

In BC alone, 50 overdose prevention sites – the “drug dens” of Poilievre’s speeches -- would be forced to close, move or seek new approval under the much more stringent rules for supervised injection sites. In Ontario, ten out of seventeen sites shut their doors in March in the face of similar restrictions from the Ford government.

“Honestly,” Blyth says, “any politician if they were there to see what we have to deal with, would be probably be on bended knee begging us to keep helping. You know, it makes no sense that people who work so hard and do so much with so little to help people would have to even fight for what we're doing.

“That’s why I think it's important for them to come down and just see people and talk to people. We’ve invited conservatives to come down. We had a bunch of MPs come down. The Conservatives didn't come.” (MLA Claire Rattée, mental health and addiction critic of the BC Conservatives, has visited Vancouver OPS.)

“I encourage them to come because I think when they see what we do, they’ll go, ‘Oh, my God, this makes a lot of sense. This is really good.'

“‘How do we do more of this? You know, how do we? How can we help people? No one wants people to be stuck using drugs.”

Ultimately, Blyth believes, Vancouver OPS will survive even if Poilievre is successful. “I think, at the end of the day, they can’t disagree with helping people. And the number of people we actually help get into recovery . . . They’re not going to be able to do that in any other situation.”