Don’t expect spike in arrests after B.C. ends decriminalization: police chief

Then Vancouver Police deputy chief Fiona Wilson steps away from the podium after speaking during a news conference in Vancouver, on Monday, Jan. 30, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

The chief of Victoria’s police department supports ending drug decriminalization in British Columbia, but says she doesn’t expect to see a spike in arrests once the program ends this month, since it was already wound back 20 months ago.

Fiona Wilson was originally a prominent advocate for decriminalization of personal possession of small amounts of drugs in 2023 when she was vice-president of the BC Association of Chiefs of Police, saying it had the “potential to address harms associated with substance use” as an “important part of an integrated approach.”

In an interview Thursday, Wilson, who was also Vancouver’s deputy police chief at the time, said supporting decriminalization was an attempt to “move the dial” during the opioid crisis in B.C.

“I think that, as important as it is for police to be willing to support new and innovative initiatives, we also have to have the courage to stand up and say when something is not working, and that’s what happened with decriminalization here in British Columbia,” she said.

B.C. Health Minister Josie Osborne announced on Wednesday that the province would not be renewing the exemption granted by Health Canada that allows for decriminalization. It is set to expire on Jan. 31.

Wilson said police saw “really concerning situations of public consumption” when decriminalization began, and initially officers could rarely step in.

“We had situations where someone might be standing at a bus shelter with a bunch of kids on their way to school and, you know, openly smoking crack cocaine,” she said.

“In a situation like that, because bus shelters were not part of exceptions to the exemption, police had no lawful authority in the absence of any other criminal behaviour to even approach that person.”

In 2024, after advocacy from police, the B.C. government had the exemption to federal drug legislation amended to restrict possession to private homes and places where homeless people are legally sheltering, as well as designated health-care clinics.

Wilson’s public stance on decriminalization took a major shift that year when she testified to a federal parliamentary committee about the difficulties police were facing dealing with “problematic drug use.”

Numbers released by the province in August 2025 show that in 2022, the year before the start of decriminalization, B.C. saw an average of 509 possession offences a month. During the initial exemption, that number dropped to 165 a month, and then climbed to 403 after decriminalization was curtailed in 2024.

Wilson said Thursday that the 2024 changes “really gave police back those powers” to intervene and that once decriminalization ends she doesn’t expect there to be more arrests.

“The reality is the police aren’t going into people’s private residences to arrest them for simple possession because they’re using illicit drugs inside that private residence. We don’t have the grounds to do that,” she said.

“Many of those health facilities already have Section 56 exemptions,” she added. “We wouldn’t be going into a supervised consumption site to arrest people for consuming illicit drugs. So the rare circumstance where the (current) exemption would still impact police is indeed very, very, very rare.”

In a statement, the Union of BC Indian Chiefs said it was “extremely concerned” by B.C.’s decision to end the pilot program.

“Instead of strengthening and fully resourcing the initiative, the province weakened it through policy rollbacks in 2023 and again in May 2024, including recriminalizing possession in public spaces, and failing to implement the comprehensive supports required for success,” the statement said.

“By failing to adequately resource a holistic, culturally safe system of care and instead retreating from decriminalization altogether, B.C. is once again treating a public-health emergency as a criminal issue, a shift that will disproportionately have negative impact on First Nations.”

Supporters of decriminalization have publicly worried that ending the program will mean a return to inconsistent enforcement by police.

“Before decriminalization, we saw some jurisdictions not charging and arresting people. Some were charging people all the time,” DJ Larkin, executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition at Simon Fraser University, said in an interview Wednesday.

“So we go back to this really inconsistent approach that can have a really negative impact, especially in smaller communities in the north and Indigenous communities.”

Wilson said prosecutors have been clear that they will only follow through with a simple possession charge in extraordinary circumstances and that after someone is arrested, police have the option to direct them to treatment options or a safe consumption site.

“Police need to have discretion so that they can deal with circumstances on a case-by-case basis and I think that’s really important,” she said.

This report by Ashley Joannou, The Canadian Press, was first published Jan. 15, 2026.