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On Wednesday's special Buffalo Roundtable live stream, Sheila Gunn Reid, Lise Merle, and Stockwell Day reacted to the Alberta government's decision to shut down one of three 'supervised drug consumption sites' in Edmonton.

The province closed the drug consumption site at Royal Alexandra Hospital on Tuesday, with Mental Health and Addiction Minister Rick Wilson saying last month that the site would be replaced by a 'rapid access treatment site'.

There are still two 'supervised' drug consumption sites remaining in Edmonton, with one located at the George Spady Centre and another at Radius Community Health and Healing, according to the CBC.

Sheila commended the Alberta government for making the move, citing the facility's true impact on struggling residents and the surrounding community.

"If you have ever been to the Royal Alexandra Hospital lately, you are running the gauntlet of people that are slowly, or quickly depending on the day, putting themselves into an early grave. And the province has made sure now that that is no more," she said.

"And I see that other provinces, namely Saskatchewan, have adopted now our targeted approach on the opioid poison epidemic. It's not just getting rid of the supervised injection sites, consumption sites, or smoking sites, or huffing sites, or whatever it is, but they're also moving towards something called compassionate care," Sheila continued.

"Families and communities that are held hostage by somebody else's addiction have a point of contact with the police to get these people into forcible treatment and get them back being productive members of society. Because this is not kindness to allow people to languish in addiction and then ask the rest of us to help them with it," she said.

Former opposition leader Stockwell Day recalled previously raising concerns about so-called 'harm reduction' policies and being ridiculed.

"When a couple of us raised that issue, we got hounded in media, we got ridiculed, because we were saying this approach is going to lead to an increase in drug deaths, an increase in drug addiction, we were told 'no it's not, this is being transparent, this is being loving,'" he said.

"And of course with this whole approach to providing free drugs, providing so-called safe sites, providing the equipment, now giving them rooms to go and live in for free ... and of course it's gone through the roof, addiction rates through the roof, death rates, way up since they adopted that policy," Day said.