The weaving path carved down the sidewalk toward legitimacy by Insite, Vancouver’s—and North America’s—only safe and legal drug injection facility, is beginning to spell out a word, and that word is ideology. Last week, the Supreme Court of Canada found that any attempt by the government of Canada to close Insite would be unconstitutional on the grounds that its closure would deny essential medical care to an identifiable class of citizens and would therefore be a discriminatory act. Two days later, Tony Clement, federal Conservative minister of health, dedicated fan of Margaret Thatcher, and a man who, when a 24-year-old student at University of Toronto, tried to arrange a speaking tour for one of South Africa’s chief supporters for Apartheid, announced his government would appeal the Supreme Court decision. In a press conference, he justified the move by claiming research shows Insite “has saved only one life,” whereas it is reasonable to suppose, he said, that Insite’s offerings of safe drug injecting facilities surely has lead to more people taking more drugs and so has lead to a greater number of deaths than the one it has saved.

It may be only life has literally been saved at Insite in any recordable way. Perhaps a drug user staggered in the doors one day and collapsed on the floor only to be revived by staff nurses. In this sense, one might look at hospital emergency rooms and find they don’t literally save nearly as many lives as we suppose they do, considering only those who come in and collapse on the floor moments from death. A more reasonable assessment would include assumptions about the numbers of drug injections that took place at Insite instead of in the surrounding alleys where needles are dirty, doses are unmeasured and overdoses or exposure to diseases are rampant. Science cannot count the number of events that do not happen. Since he quoted science, you’d think Clement would be familiar with this important core principle of its method.

In any event, Insite was never meant to be an emergency room where literally dying people would find immediate medical attention. It’s foundational claim is that drug users would routinely encounter nurses instead of pushers in their rounds and would thereby slowly acquire knowledge, self-esteem and dignity, as well as a range of health advice, elements known to set a good proportion of addicts onto the road to recovery.

We don’t know if the minister of health disputes that claim because he has never addressed it. Clement’s ignorance of this effect appears willful. The equally conservative government of BC fully endorses Insite explicitly because of this claim and its validity. The even more conservative Mayor of Vancouver does as well, also on the grounds that Insite saves lives in this larger sense. It is impossible that the federal health minister is unaware of the claim or doesn’t understand it, yet he is not on record disputing it, as though he has deliberately chosen to ignore it.

So what lies behind the federal Conservative opposition to the existence of Insite—an opposition that has been ratcheted up considerably and surprisingly this week to the point where the feds are willing to make this a “go to the wall” issue, even while knowing they risk alienating conservative allies in electorally crucial British Columbia and Vancouver? The wedge the Insite issue has cleaved open between local conservatives and federal conservatives is none other than the distinction between philosophically derived conservatism and religiously derived conservatism.

The Mayor of Vancouver is on record as an avowed Edmund Burke philosophical conservative. The Gordon Campbell-led Liberal regime in Victoria is largely a philosophically fiscal conservative regime. Both regard social policy, and on the larger canvas, the nation’s cultural topography, as secondary to their motivations. Insite’s fate has little bearing on property rights, the chief concern of philosophical conservatives, and so opinion about it can be formed ad hoc and in response to a reasonable review of its purposes and its achievements.

For federal conservatives, on the other hand, social policy and its effects on the nation’s cultural life is of the utmost importance. Federal conservatives understand the seminal role of culture in society and fully grasp how social policy determines the range of what is possible in every other avenue of policy making. On this level, symbols, messages and meanings take on far more importance than buildings, funding plans or research and knowledge. When fully engaged in a cultural battle, it becomes natural to see all opposition as culturally motivated as well, in the familiar manner of everything looking like a nail to a hammer. Science in the battlefield of culture is therefore just another combatant of dubious allegiance. Weapons in cultural battles are symbols, messages and meanings, and so scientific research that accretes into the cultural battlefield is understood by religiously-derived conservatives as only more symbols, as message-making, or as Rosetta Stones of mystical meanings that contain far more than what appears to untrained eyes on first reading.

For health minister Clement, it is less important that Inside provides knowledge and safety to self-injecting addicts than that its existence “sends a message” through cultural channels, a message, in this case, that the federal conservatives have deciphered as one that authoritatively approves of the self-destruction that drug injection involves. In this view, the finding of the Supreme Court, that Insite provides constitutionally guaranteed access to vital health care to a certain class of citizens, is utterly absurd, since drug injection clashes fatally with the symbol of health that all other health care facilities more or less successfully embody.

There is little prospect of a negotiated middle ground between cultural warriors, particularly when only one side presumes there is a cultural battle on. In federal conservative eyes, the rest of the pragmatic, technocratic nation, including erstwhile allied conservatives on the west coast, “just don’t get it.” While even strongly conservative forces in BC have found it practical to bend on the issue of Insite in light of popular support, scientific research and electoral realities, for federal conservatives, Insite is a bona fide flashpoint in the cultural wars they are fully engaged with. They don’t see health care workers and volunteers helping unfortunate addicts to inject safely and maybe encounter someone who cares about them and demonstrates a modicum of respect toward them. What federal conservatives see are combatants of diametrically opposing forces on the cultural battlefield who are all the more dangerous for having cleverly deployed subterfuge to bring unaware popular support to their side, including even usually allied local conservative forces.

One might have thought that strong popular support for Insite, along with local police forces endorsing it, mayors past and present from throughout the range of the political spectrum advocating for it, and both sides of the normally deeply divided provincial legislature supporting it, would have convinced federal conservatives this battle is lost. Instead, this unusual alignment of forces have only made more clear to federal conservatives that this issue is the big one—the one into which their opponents have poured all their energies and resources to seduce away even most of their normally allied local conservatives. It is in fact the outpouring of popular support for Insite, the police forces’ endorsements of it, and the support of local conservatives that has convinced the federal conservatives that Insite is indeed the battle worth going to the wall over. While most observers shake their heads in confusion at Clement’s last stand seeing only a no-win situation for the federal conservatives, from the federal conservatives’ point of view, their last stand on Insite is a no-lose situation. Succeed in closing Insite down, and they have defeated their cultural opponents in what they have perceived as a key battleground. Fail to close it, and they can rally their base with another tale of how the barbarians are pounding at the last gates of civilization, even if it is only federal conservatives who see Insite as those last gates.