44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 2, 2022 02:00PM
- Mar/2/22 5:36:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I know that there has been a change of plans, but if I understand correctly, I will have nine minutes before Private Members' Business and the consideration of the bill introduced by my dear colleague, the hon. member for Courtenay—Alberni. Do I have nine minutes?
After Private Members' Business, I will have five more minutes.
Do I have that right?
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- Mar/2/22 5:38:24 p.m.
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Thank you, Madam Speaker. I knew there would be an interruption, and I wanted to confirm that. All of us, not just in the House of Commons but across Canada, are looking forward to hearing about the bill brought forward by my colleague from Courtenay—Alberni. This is a very worthwhile bill that will make a difference for so many Canadians. We look forward to it.
I gave the first part of my speech on Monday, and I spoke at length about the situation of Ottawa residents. Today, I will give the second part, and as was just confirmed, I will give the third part after private members' business. Here is the second part of my speech.
Members will recall that in the first part of my speech I talked about the profound impacts of the occupation on the residents of Ottawa. During the blockades many thousands of jobs were lost. The people of Ottawa suffered incredibly during this three-week period due to government inaction and due to a lack of action taken to protect them.
We saw people with disabilities and seniors denied essential services. We saw cases of vandalism and assault. We certainly saw the highest noise levels, those normally seen in airports, going on 24-7 in downtown Ottawa. We saw toxic pollution from the diesel engines running 24-hour a day, which had profound impacts on children in downtown Ottawa. We also saw the loss of thousands of jobs and the closure of hundreds of businesses.
The first part of my speech was to address the profound hardship that the people of Ottawa endured during that period. That is why it is so vitally important now, having thankfully come to a peaceful resolution, and some members of Parliament would say that is despite the Emergencies Act and others would say that it is because of the Emergencies Act, to move immediately to putting in place a parliamentary review. That is what Canadians want to see. They want to see answers to those questions. They believe we need to move with alacrity.
We had an opportunity on Monday for the official opposition to join all the other recognized parties in the House of Commons and the parliamentary groups in the Senate to put this motion in place by unanimous consent. We saw this, thankfully, with the ban on conversion therapy. The Conservatives stepped up, and we had a unanimous adoption of that important legislation in the House of Commons. We could have and should have done the same thing on Monday.
Now we have the opportunity to have a vote tonight. If we had not taken the step we just took, the Conservatives would have delayed, for another three weeks, the putting into place of this vitally important parliamentary review. It is an absolutely essential parliamentary review.
I am speaking in favour of this motion because what it does, and why it has such broad support within the House of Commons and within the Senate, is it accomplishes a number of things in a very important way to set up a structure that would allow for a thorough and impartial review of what transpired, not only with the Emergencies Act, but also in the three weeks prior.
We have two chairs in place from the House of Commons, representing both sides of the debate, an NDP co-chair and a Bloc co-chair, the NDP having voted in favour and the Bloc having voted against. We have that impartiality, in the chairs, that is so vitally important. We have a fair representation from all parties and all of the four Senate groups. With the changes in the Senate, the idea that we could only have one Conservative senator and nobody else made no sense at all.
Here we have fair representation from the Senate groups and fair representation from the House of Commons. The Conservatives certainly cannot complain. They have three members, and if we include the ex-Conservatives in the Canadian Senate group, four members, which is more than any other party in this parliamentary review committee. The Conservatives have three or four, depending on how we want to count ex-Conservatives. The Liberals have three. The NDP has one. The Bloc has one. The Independent Senate group has one. The Progressive Senate group has one, and the Conservative senators have one.
It is a fair division of the membership of a committee that is so essential to moving forward immediately. We have a fair division of the chair roles. We have a fair division in terms of the party membership and the Senate group membership. With that on the table, we should have been able to move forward with this on Monday. The Conservatives should have said, “Yes, this is important. We believe we need to move ahead rapidly.” Instead, they have delayed and continue to want to delay. Next week and the following week are constituency weeks. Obviously, they wanted to delay this for another three weeks.
Ottawa cannot wait. Canadians cannot wait. We have to move ahead with this parliamentary review. That is why it is so important that we have the vote tonight. I am thankful, of course, that three of the four recognized parties in this House of Commons will be voting yes on this motion and that the Senate groups have said that they will be voting in support of this motion to put in place a parliamentary review. The NDP thinks it is absolutely essential. It has to happen now. We could get to work tomorrow.
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Madam Speaker, I sincerely thank my colleague from Courtenay—Alberni for his speech.
Clearly, this crisis has already taken too many lives. We understand that action is urgently needed, and that is why we made it a priority.
I would like to ask the member this. Does he agree that moving in this direction requires addressing fundamental issues, including working with partners to establish appropriate thresholds to define possession and ensure other supports are in place?
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank the member for Courtenay—Alberni for his leadership with this bill. I want him to know the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands and I will both be supporting this for the simple reason that this bill, if passed, would save lives.
In the Waterloo region alone, there were 155 preventable deaths last year. This bill follows the recommendations we already have from the expert task force on substance use. This bill follows through on the talk in this House recognizing that the poisoning crisis is not a criminal justice issue but one of public health.
I would like to ask him about the importance of low-barrier access to safe supply, which is part of the national strategy called for in this bill.
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Madam Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C‑216 from the member for Courtenay—Alberni, whom I like very much and have known since 2015. He is a noble-hearted man. I am confident that he brings his bill to us today, at the passage-in-principle stage, because he hopes to address this acutely alarming issue.
I will read out the summary because the bill has three parts. I would have thought the government would want to put these eggs in its Bill C‑5 basket, but apparently not. I am just thinking out loud, but the fact remains that the Bloc Québécois falls somewhere in between. I will explain its position.
First, this enactment amends the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to repeal a provision that makes it an offence to possess certain substances. It also makes consequential amendments to other acts.
Second, it enacts the Expungement of Certain Drug-related Convictions Act. We debated this and talked about how someone who gets stopped for simple possession is in trouble not only on human level, because they have substance abuse issues, but also because they are left with a criminal record and all the associated stigma.
The third part is important in my opinion. Substance use is a complex problem and phenomenon, and a national strategy on substance use is important, but what I find most intriguing is that the bill requires the Minister of Health to develop a national strategy to address the harm caused by problematic substance use.
The thing is, in the bill itself, it says this whole strategy, including the decriminalization of simple possession, will be implemented the year after the act comes into force. For now, I need to think about this because it raises some issues.
I am going to do something I have never done in the House. Medical assistance in dying is another difficult issue, but I have never shared a personal experience. I want people to understand that things have evolved. There is a thing called sociology of law. We have come a long way, and it is great to hear all members of the House because nowadays, in 2022, we no longer see problems associated with drug use as a crime issue; we see them as a public health issue, a socioeconomic issue and, sometimes, a mental health issue.
I had the privilege of having an experience in my life that made me grow. It was in 1998, 24 years ago. After that, I could never again look at a homeless person with multiple addictions in the same way when I saw them on the street. Why?
I had some communications students come to me and ask me for some ethical guidance. They told me about a place called Chez ma cousine Evelyn, which served as a kind of buffer zone. Speaking of diversion, there was a pilot project at the time. In order to get a bed, a place, a room in that house—and there were not many beds—you had to be homeless, an addict, and HIV positive. You had to have all three of those problems.
We set out looking for people like that downtown, and we identified a huge number of young people under 35 who met those criteria. Unfortunately, there were no resources.
We approached these people and got them to speak with us. They could be anyone, including me or anyone here, a grandson, my daughter or a neighbour's daughter. These people had a life story that had nothing to do with their current state. Some were remarkable. I remember one person who had studied at Oxford. We would have coffee very early in the morning and she would teach me about philosophy, even though she was at the point where she did not care about anything other than her substance use.
These people were well known to the local police and therefore could go to sleep at Chez ma cousine Évelyne, consume substances there and be supervised by workers who helped manage their consumption. What is interesting, they told us, is that the first few times they injected, they would hide in the bedroom to do it, even though they were allowed do it there without any problem. If the police saw them on the street late at night, needing a ride, the police would bring them back to Chez ma cousine Évelyne.
To make a long story short, we worked with them for three months and only then, and not before, were we able to turn on the cameras. When they talked to us, it was as though the cameras were not there. We learned a lot during that time. Chez ma cousine Évelyne was able to take them in when they had hit rock bottom, felt defeated and had a millstone around their necks. Some people believe that all it takes is resolve and keeping one's head above water, but these people kept going under right away.
Seeing this reality was quite the experience for me. When these people hit bottom, there is no one there for them. They themselves acknowledge that they have alienated everyone. In some cases, we were able to ensure that the individual could die at Chez ma cousine Évelyne surrounded by family members, with whom they had managed to reconnect. Those were intensely human moments.
Because of this experience, I am saying yes to decriminalization. However, we need a way to achieve that. A very interesting report by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction points out that legislative intervention, meaning decriminalization, is ultimately only one of the pillars of a comprehensive approach, which takes time and effort to implement. Portugal, for example, scaled up prevention, treatment and harm reduction services two years prior to decriminalization.
Implementation of a pan-Canadian strategy should therefore precede decriminalization to ensure that the federal government or other levels of government do not shirk their responsibility by arguing that those people are no longer in the legal system.
That is the main problem we see in this bill. It is also the reason we would like to improve it. We will reflect on this.
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