Island's first long-term recovery centre for women opens in View Royal

The first long-term recovery centre for women opened on Vancouver Island in View Royal last Wednesday. The New Roads Therapeutic Recovery Community facility at 74 Taclott Rd, housed in a former youth detention centre, is already home to a men’s long-term recovery program.

The facility for women is long overdue and adds to sorely needed long-term recovery bed numbers in the CRD.

The 20-bed facility (18 single rooms and one double room) is operated by Our Place Society, a Greater Victoria organization that provides housing, shelter, substance-use recovery and other vital support to people in the community experiencing homelessness, mental-health or substance-use challenges.

To be eligible for the program, women need to have medium-to-severe addiction issues, mental-health challenges, an experience with homelessness and a connection to the criminal-justice system. They must apply for the program and then go through detox, unless they’re coming from the jail system. In that case, women are referred to the centre by a judge and are released into the program.

The facility’s women’s recovery manager Lee Sundquist’s story is a model of the kind of reintegration and family reunification that the centre hopes its clients can achieve.

Sundquist had her first drink at 12 and was injecting heroin by 16.

“I didn’t plan to grow up to be an addict,” she said.

What followed, she said, was a “lifetime of addiction, trauma, abuse and involvement with the criminal justice system.”

Facing jail time in 2013, it was a local judge who gave her the chance to leave the island to attend treatment on the mainland. After eight years away, Lee returned  home where she worked her way up from junior support worker to assistant manager, to women's recovery community manager.

Island Health identifies addiction as a chronic relapsing condition. New Roads clients can return for multiple 9 week stays for up to a period of two years to access treatment, therapy, and educational and employment opportunities .

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Before the new centre opened, women had to travel to the mainland for residential treatment at places like Heartwood Centre for Women in Vancouver and Peardonville House in Abbotsford.

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“Leaving the island was not easy,” Sundquist said, “It meant severing ties with my family, with my friends and my two dogs and the community where I felt safe and supported. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.”

Many women cite fear of losing custody or lack of childcare as major barriers to seeking substance use disorder treatment, and prefer treatment programs that allow them to bring their children. Beginning in 1990, Peardonville's “Moms and Kids” program allowed women struggling with addiction to bring their under-school-age children to treatment with them.

While the new facility in View Royal does not allow women to bring their children into the residential program, it does mean they can get treatment with family and community nearby.

“At New Roads, women on the island will finally have access to the treatment that they need and deserve without the heartbreaking choice of leaving everything behind.

"The barriers that I once faced will no longer be barriers for them—and for that I am so grateful,” Sundquist said.

The transformation of the New Roads Facility from carceral model to a residential one speaks to the shift in thinking around addiction and the centre’s focus on rehabilitation and reintegration and over criminalization.

Women in the program “don’t have to leave supports behind that help them to reintegrate back into their communities,” said Nina Krieger, MLA for Victoria-Swan Lake, who was on hand for the opening.

The opening is timely. Toxic substance use has grown and recovery options on the Island have not yet caught up.

Even with a number of beds announced last year including 40 in North Saanich, then-minister for Mental Health and Addictions Jennifer Whiteside said that “We are in the depths of a real crisis in our province.”

According to the province, the model for Our Place Society’s therapeutic recovery community is The San Patrignano Therapeutic Community in Italy. That 40-year-old program has a success rate of 72%. The men’s program at New Roads has a 60% success rate that Director Cheryl Diebel hopes will translate to the women’s program.

Provincial funding for the centre was announced last January by then Mental Health and Addictions minister Jennifer Whiteside and was part of a commitment the provincial government made in 2017 to open 700 new treatment beds across the province.

In 2024, there were 125K people living with opioid-use disorder in BC. According to Corrections Canada research, overdose rates in women  doubled between 2016 and 2021. And according to reporting by Island Health, unregulated drug poisoning is now the leading cause of young adults on Vancouver Island. Unregulated drug deaths are highest among men between the ages of 30-39 years old. The ratio of overdose fatalities of women to men were 21:74 in 2022 and 28:76 in 2023.  While drug poisoning   a disproportionate threat to men, women are increasingly represented in those numbers.

Opioids have become increasingly potent and contaminated over the past decade, no regulations are yet in place in BC to regulate their manufacture and distribution. The criminalization of the drug creates barriers for people seeking treatment.

This program will work to reverse that trend among women in the Greater Victoria region.

In addition to the new treatment centre, substance-use support services for women have also expanded in Vancouver, Nanaimo and Kelowna, where 24 additional women-only treatment beds opened in 2024.

In January 2024, the Province announced funding for 180 publicly funded treatment and recovery beds in the province through CMHA-BC. The new beds at New Roads brings the total number of beds announced and opened by the province to 163 of 180.

Touring the industrial community kitchen

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New Roads is the result of millions in private and public support

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The BC Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions provided $4.7 million in funding for the initial recovery-based program for men at the New Roads facility in 2018 and BC Housing provided a $310k grant for renovations. The facility had a $1/year lease agreement which, up until 2021,  also covered the payment of property taxes.

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The capital cost to build the women’s community facility — $3.7 million — was raised entirely through private donors, said Cheryl Diebel, director of New Roads.

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The annual operating cost of just over $3 million is funded by the province. The funding for the women’s treatment program is part of a $73-million investment the province is making over three years in more than 100 locations in B.C. to help battle the toxic drug crisis.

Other guests included Colwood mayor Doug Kobayashi, Victoria mayor Marianne Alto, Colwood Councilor Dave Grove, and Health Minster Josie Osborne who spoke to the need for a women-focused space.

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“Many people are facing mental health substance use challenges. These are struggles that are compounded by overlapping issues like homelessness trauma poverty intergenerational trauma and they are complex factors that can create additional barriers for people to get the help that they need. This can be especially true for women, Two-Spirited people and gender-diverse people.”

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She acknowledged the work of former MLA Mitzi Dean and MLA Grace Lore (Victoria-Beacon Hill) and Jim Hartshorne (developer) whose work and advocacy for the project, she said, were fundamental to its finally coming to fruition.

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