Zivo's View: British Columbia NDP couldn’t defend a bad drug policy – they tried to smear me instead

Investigative Columnist Adam Zivo explains his side of a dispute with B.C. Health Officials

Journalists have a duty to hold governments accountable for bad policymaking – but what happens when officials retaliate by spreading disinformation about your work? I learned the answer to that question earlier this month when the British Columbia NDP attacked my credibility after I unearthed another “harm reduction” scandal for the National Post.

About a month ago, I discovered that B.C.’s government had helped produce a “safer bathroom” toolkit, advocating for turning public washrooms into de facto overdose prevention sites. The toolkit recommended, among other things, that washrooms be brightly lit and include counters and ledges to make drug consumption easier.

It further suggested the installation of intercoms, baby monitors, and egg timers, so addicts could call for assistance without being startled by regular wellness checks.

While these recommendations might make sense in locations that specifically cater to addicts, the project leads emphasized that they should be implemented “anywhere”, including libraries and hospitals.

“What we must not do is try to prevent or deter access to bathrooms for people who use substances,” wrote one of them in a promotional essay published by The Conversation.

At no point did the toolkit or its supporting materials seriously address the fact that other people – children, the disabled, and the elderly especially – deserve access to safe, drug-free facilities.

The toolkit was funded by Michael Smith Health Research BC, the province’s leading health research agency, and produced by four harm reduction researchers at the University of Victoria, including a longtime employee of Vancouver Coastal Health, one of the province’s five health authorities.

Island Health, another provincial health authority, later provided grants to several libraries on Vancouver Island so they could install bathroom motion detectors, as recommended by the toolkit. In an associated press release, Jennifer Whiteside, the provincial Minister of Mental Health and Addiction, is quoted praising the initiative.

This will be important later.

While researching the toolkit, I learned that several influential public health institutions in B.C. had published guidelines discouraging the use of blue lights in bathrooms. Although it is widely believed that these lights reduce intravenous drug use by making veins harder to see, the guidelines claimed that blue lights are ineffective deterrents.

This turned out to be untrue.

The guidelines cited only two low-quality studies, from 2010 and 2013, which interviewed a small number of drug users (31 and 18 interviewees, respectively).

Not only is this insufficient for responsible policymaking, but the studies also actually suggested, in direct contradiction to the provincial government’s claims, that blue lights do deter a significant amount of drug use.

After gathering all of this information, I emailed the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions a list of questions about the safer bathroom toolkit and blue light studies. I asked them, point-blank, whether they supported the toolkit’s recommendations.

The Ministry responded evasively. While they emphasized that they opposed drug use in bathrooms, they did not specify whether they supported the toolkit and ignored every question regarding blue lights in bathrooms. So, I summarized their response in my National Post article and added a hyperlink to the full exchange so readers could see exactly what the government had written.

This story was bound to create a headache for the BC NDP.

Voters across the province, having lost patience with rampant crime and drug use, are now flocking to the BC Conservatives, who have promised stricter addiction policies. With both parties polling neck-in-neck, there is a good chance Premier Eby’s government will fall in next month’s provincial election.

Eby has responded by belatedly pivoting away from the harm reduction movement. Not only is he embracing the rhetoric of recovery and treatment, but his government has also backtracked on several experiments – such as drug decriminalization and crack pipe vending machines – that were, until this year, championed as “life-saving.”

In this context, any media story that tethers the BC NDP to harm reduction radicalism is, to some degree, a threat to the government’s reelection prospects.

Within a day of my story’s publication, Whiteside’s office emailed the National Post claiming her government had never supported the toolkit. I wrote a thorough reply addressing their comments, noting that they could have clarified this earlier but chose not to.

Shortly after, Jennifer Whiteside, the provincial Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, furiously posted on X that the safer bathroom toolkit was “not a BC plan” and that I was “fear-mongering and spreading false information.”

She announced that her office had requested a correction and retraction, sharing a screenshot of my headline, with my name, emblazoned with a big red stamp: “FALSE.”

The stunt was unusual, unprofessional, and, ultimately, futile.

Though Whiteside’s post went somewhat viral, and was even reshared by the BC NDP’s official account, the National Post did not retract anything. Why would it? Everything in the article was true.

“There is nothing to retract. The toolkit was funded by a government-funded agency and produced by another government-funded institution. Related research was promoted by a provincial health authority. The government’s evasive response was included. No facts are in dispute,” wrote my editor, Carson Jerema, in a public post defending me.

I ended up writing a series of detailed posts, substantiating my work with screenshots of email correspondences with Whiteside’s office. The thread was widely shared, garnering over 100,000 views, with many commentators expressing frustration with the BC NDP for misleading the public.

Whiteside’s office seemed to drop the issue afterward.

As I’ve detailed in other publications, this isn’t the first time the BC NDP has misled the public about its addiction policies.

When I began reporting on the widespread diversion of “safer supply” drugs last year, provincial officials insisted that my work was disinformation. Since then, they have been hit with a class-action lawsuit alleging that they misled the public about diversion, and have slowly but inexorably been forced to admit that I was telling the truth.

This is what responsible journalism is about: persisting in the face of opposition from powerful interests. Governments may choose to fabricate their own realities, but with persistence, their illusions can be dispelled.

When early reports emerged about rampant money laundering in B.C. casinos, and Beijing’s interference in Canadian politics, these, too, were initially dismissed as “conspiracy theories.” Over time, however, diligent journalists proved these stories to be true.

But it’s one thing for a government to indirectly undermine your findings, versus attacking you directly.

I did not expect the BC NDP to engage in a full-on “post-truth” smear job against an inconvenient media critic. That kind of behavior seemed beneath them – more of an American thing, really – but I apparently overestimated them. While the BC NDP has claimed their opponents are embracing “Trump-style” politics this election, it turns out a lot of projection has been going on.