Trudeau scholar examines involuntary treatment

June 01, 2026

By Amanda Farrell-Low

Involuntary care. Compassionate intervention. Civil commitment. These are all terms for policies being enacted in an ever-growing list of jurisdictions in  Canada—including BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba —to force people into substance-use treatment against their will.  In the face of a toxic drug crisis that has killed over 55,000 people in Canada—more than 22,000 of them in BC—in the last decade, it is being billed by governments and proponents of abstinence-oriented care as a novel and innovative policy solution.

But it’s not a new idea. And Aaron Bailey, a PhD student from the Social Dimensions of Health program, plans to use his recent  2026 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship to shine a light on the history of involuntary treatment in BC by working with those most directly impacted by this policy: people who use drugs.

“My previous archival work has shown that this is not the first time this has happened in British Columbia, and that these decisions have consistently deviated from the available evidence base,” says Bailey, who is a research assistant with the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research (CISUR).

“I hope to understand how the political and the economic conditions surrounding these repeated attempts at involuntary substance use treatment in British Columbia have continually superseded both evidence and the expressed demands of people who use drugs with lived experience of accessing substance use care in BC.”

Archival evidence

Bailey’s master's thesis in health promotion looked at the history of alcohol control in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside between the 1950s and 1990s. While he was doing his research, he encountered references to involuntary treatment for people using alcohol, particularly people who were unhoused and in areas of the city that were being gentrified.

“I kept seeing these little archival fragments of involuntary treatment proposals,” says Bailey, “So, I'd kind of had in the back of my mind this idea that there is a precedent for this, this is something that has continually emerged in British Columbia politics and the history of substance-use care.”

Bailey’s motivation to turn this idea into a community-based research project came from the ongoing advocacy work of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, Eastside Illicit Drinkers Group for Education, and Surrey Union of Drug Users, where he worked as an allied staff member. They had a consistent reaction to BC’s current proposals around involuntary care and changes to the Mental Health Act.

“Folks around me in the movement really began to say, ‘Hey, this is violent, we don't agree with this, this is not what we need,’” Bailey recalls. “It brought me back to those archival traces that I'd found, and that kind of started the wheels turning about how a community-based research project could take these methods that I've learned and this interest in history and apply that to involuntary treatment.”

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Bailey’s hope is to use his Trudeau scholarship to build a community-centred team of researchers to conduct the work in a truly participatory way, visiting archives, doing document analysis, and conducting interviews alongside members of BC’s drug user groups. The goal is to learn and mobilize findings together and potentially travel around the province to visit different archives.

 “Folks who use drugs are doing amazing advocacy in multiple regions of British Columbia. Coincidentally, there are also extremely valuable archives in multiple regions of British Columbia, so I'm extremely excited also for the Foundation's support to allow my work to be province-wide,” he says.

Bailey says receiving the Trudeau scholarship feels like a validation of academic criticism of drug policy in BC, and that he is excited to learn from his fellow Trudeau recipients.

“I think the further we can break from biomedical positivism and embrace other methods, and other ways of knowing, and other interdisciplinary or social-science-based approaches to the study of health and illness and its prevention, the better,” he says.

“So I'm excited to learn from the cohort as well and strengthen my own capacity to do this work between disciplines.”