44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 2, 2022 02:00PM
Madam Speaker, I want to thank the member for Courtenay—Alberni for his passionate work on this file. We share an idea of seeing a world free from addiction.
I would also like to thank two very dear friends of mine, Eric and Sheldon, for their assistance with this speech today, especially for sharing their experience, strength and hope with those suffering from addiction and helping them find a path toward recovery.
Addiction is an indiscriminate disease that is ravaging Canadian communities with horrifying momentum. It steals the lives of so many Canadians each and every day. The deadliest year on record for opioid-related overdoses was 2021. Statistics Canada has said that 2022 is on track to be another record-setting year.
Conservatives believe that addiction is a health issue and must be treated as such. We believe there needs to be an increase in resources for treatment and a shift in our focus towards recovery. Conservatives put forward a recovery-focused approach, one that puts focus on treating addictions as a health condition, directly into our recent election platform. Had we formed government, we wanted to revise the federal government substance abuse policy framework to make recovery an overarching goal. We would have reoriented the Canadian drug and substance strategy towards ensuring that everyone suffering from addictions had an opportunity to recover and lead a drug-free life, and that all policies that would fall under this strategy would have reduction of harm and promotion of recovery as their objectives.
We proposed concrete and detailed examples of how we would realize these goals, such as making a number of investments to create residential drug treatment beds and build recovery centres, including land-based treatment programs developed and managed by indigenous communities. Canada currently has a serious lack of addiction treatment space. There are often long wait-lists and many barriers that prevent Canadians with addictions from receiving the support they need.
I want to paint a picture of what I mean by pointing to some amazing work that is being done in my home province of Alberta, where there has been a marked change in approach over the last few years when it comes to addiction. Alberta has become focused on building a recovery-oriented system of care, one that helps people move from a life of addiction into a life of recovery. Over the last three years, it has made key investments to achieve the goal of recovery.
It created 8,000 treatment spaces, meaning that over 8,000 Albertans can access detox, treatment and recovery services every single year. Importantly, all of these new spaces are at no cost to Albertans since Alberta is the first province in Canada to completely eliminate user fees for publicly funded addictions treatment. It has made gold standard opioid-treatment drugs available on demand through the virtual opioid dependency program so that any Albertan can access evidence-based medications from anywhere in the province. It is building five new recovery communities that will add an additional 400 beds to our provincial treatment capacity.
While I do not believe that jail is the best place to address addiction, I think we really need to think carefully about how we proceed, and I have some concerns about the approach put forward by the member for Courtenay—Alberni. In fact, the Alberta Association of Chiefs of Police has been clear that it does not support decriminalization without first having necessary prevention, intervention, treatment and recovery supports in place. Decriminalizing without having the appropriate access to treatment and supports in place is akin to putting the cart before the horse.
People often like to point to jurisdictions such as Portugal when they talk about decriminalization, but what is often failed to be realized is that in Portugal drugs remain illegal and people who are in possession of deadly and dangerous drugs still face administrative penalties while they are being offered treatment. Portugal also took the time to transition carefully to a recovery model so as not to leave addicts stuck in limbo at the risk of overdose. The Portugal model is effectively a diversionary tool to assertively help people access treatment and recovery. Most importantly, Portugal has a freely and rapidly accessible treatment system.
We cannot simply take away penalties and expect things to get better. We need a comprehensive recovery-oriented system of care in place before we can even start to talk about decriminalization. The problem at the moment is that the system of care across Canada is simply not adequate to be able to handle the number of people who would be diverted into treatment if this approach were to be adopted.
We can point to Oregon as an example of where decriminalization was brought forward without adequate capacity in place. Unfortunately, it is not going very well. Its model was marketed as a tool to help people access treatment and recovery, but it did not focus on building health care capacity. What we now see in Oregon is a dysfunctional and underfunded system that lacks adequate space for treatment and recovery. Essentially, its health care system was not prepared for it and does not have the resources available to implement it properly. Canada needs a government that will invest in offering recovery and healing with a substance abuse policy framework that makes recovery from substance dependency its primary purpose.
It is worth pointing out that the Government of Alberta is currently undertaking an evidence-based study through Alberta's Select Special Committee to Examine Safe Supply. In this study, members are hearing testimony from a number of witnesses. I want to point to one particular witness, Dr. Keith Humphreys. He is currently the chair of the Stanford-Lancet commission and was the White House drug policy adviser to former president Obama. In his policy assertion, he states that safe supply is not based in evidence, and I think it is really important to make sure we are keeping that in mind. I want to remind the House that OxyContin, the very drug that is responsible for so much of the opioid dependency issues we have today, was billed as safe supply when it was originally brought forward. It is effectively a marketing tool, rather than a medical term.
There is not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution to recovery and addiction. We need a suite of programs and initiatives to address this crisis. However, the most important thing is that we need to expand access to a range of treatments right now. These services have to be provided in a manner that is fair to the community, assertive in dealing with the illness of addiction and compassionate to the person who is struggling. Recovery must always be recognized as an achievable goal, and patients need to be assertively encouraged to pursue it. This means innovative treatment and recovery healing modalities that are not band-aid solutions that manage addiction but neglect root causes. Until recovery is as easy to access as drugs, we should not even think about moving in this direction.
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Madam Speaker, I am deeply honoured to rise today to speak to Bill C-216, the health-based approach to the substance use act.
I would like to thank my colleague, the hon. member for Courtenay—Alberni, for introducing this legislation and for his tireless efforts to advance compassionate and evidenced-based drug policy in this country.
In the shadow of COVID-19, the overdose epidemic has rapidly worsened across Canada, and it is hard to believe that could have happened. In British Columbia, 2,224 died from overdoses in 2021 alone. This represents the deadliest year on record in Canadian history, and a 26% increase from 2020. December 2021 was also the deadliest month on record in British Columbia, with 215 people losing their lives that month alone from an opioid-poisoned drug death. That is the equivalent of about seven deaths per day. Across Canada, over 25,000 Canadians have lost their lives to the overdose epidemic in the last six years alone.
Although COVID-19 has fuelled this crisis, it did not create it. Decades of criminalization; a toxic, poisoned, illicit supply; and a lack of timely access to harm reduction, treatment and recovery services have caused this ongoing catastrophe.
The Liberal government claims that its response to COVID-19 has been evidenced-based and informed by science and the advice of public health experts. It is time to apply that approach to Canada's other epidemic. It is time to treat substance use addictions as the health issues they truly are. The legislation before the House today would do exactly that.
The health-based approach to the substance use act would comprehensively address Canada's overdose epidemic as follows: It would decriminalize personal drug possession; it would provide for record expungement; it would ensure a low-barrier access to a regulated, safe supply; and it would expand access to harm reduction, treatment and recovery services across Canada while also focusing on prevention and education.
Decriminalization is one of those issues on which I believe voters are far ahead of politicians. It is a policy area where public opinion more accurately reflects the empirical data than our laws do. That is because not a single community across Canada is untouched by addiction. Everyone has a mother, father, sister, brother, uncle, aunt, cousin, grandparent, partner, friend, neighbour, coworker, child who has struggled with problematic substance use or substance use disorder, or maybe it is even they themself. Indeed, Canadians understand intuitively something that is critically important to acknowledge in the House tonight: Those who are suffering are not criminals. Rather, they are vulnerable people experiencing tremendous pain.
In his years working in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Dr. Gabor Maté, whom I consider to be an expert of global stature and a great Canadian, has found that childhood trauma and emotional pain lie at the root of addiction. Dr. Maté said, “This is not a war on drugs. This is a war on drug addicts.”
Addiction can never be understood if looked at through the lens of moralism and judgment. It is time, as a society, that we ask not why the addiction but instead why the pain. Indeed, if we accept that pain and trauma are at the root of addiction, then criminalization can only be seen as cruel and counterproductive, because it compounds the very problem it seeks to correct. Stigma, shame and abuse are the core emotional issues for those suffering from substance disorder, and criminalizing their behaviour exacerbates and deepens that shame and stigma. This is obvious.
Criminal sanctions are society's way of imposing maximum trauma on individuals. They get harassed by the police; they go through the indignity of arrest; they go into the very serious, intimidating context of a court; they go through a trial; they go to jail. This system is designed to impose the most serious pressure society can possibly impose. In other words, when we criminalize substance use, we retraumatize people who are already struggling to cope with trauma.
Moreover, decades of evidence have demonstrated that criminalization serves to keep people who use drugs away from prevention and early treatment health services due to fear of being arrested, labelled or outed. Criminalization also pushes people who use drugs to rely on an illicit and obviously toxic drug supply.
If criminalizing drug use worked, we would have eliminated it years ago, but instead we have spent billions of dollars, harmed millions of people, torn families and communities apart, ruined individuals' lives and achieved nothing. It is said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. If that is the case, decades of lawmakers in the House have been and are insane.
Part 1 of this legislation would end Canada's war on drugs once and for all by striking the prohibition against personal possession from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. It would end the insanity of the war on drugs.
Furthermore, criminal records amplify the harms of criminalization by exposing people who use drugs to ongoing discrimination and create barriers to housing, gainful employment, travel and community involvement. This in turn leads to further stigmatization and marginalization.
The disproportionate impact of criminal records on racialized and indigenous communities has also been well documented. That is why part 2 of this legislation is so essential to a health-based approach to drug use. It would ensure that criminal records from previous offences related to personal possession would be fully expunged, so that someone does not carry stigmatization for the rest of their lives. Unlike the current Liberal government's failed policy on cannabis pardons, the process outlined in this bill would provide for an automatic, cost-free and complete deletion of records.
Finally, part 3 of this legislation would require the development and implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to address the harm caused by problematic substance use. It would get at the real cause of the deaths. This strategy would be developed in collaboration with key stakeholders, including advocacy organizations, frontline health care providers; and, importantly, individuals with lived experience. It would address the root causes of problematic substance use; ensure access to a safe, regulated supply; provide universal access to recovery, treatment and harm reduction services; and reduce the stigma associated with substance use. There is an urgent need for low-barrier access to a safe supply of pharmaceutical-grade alternatives to illegal street drugs of all types for everyone now. Given that the main driver of the overdose crisis is the fact that the illicit, poisoned drug supply is toxic and unpredictable, experts have been clear that the death toll cannot be abated without this evidence-based measure.
Although limited access to safe supply has been provided in some jurisdictions, existing programs do not come anywhere even close to meeting demand across the country. To emphasize, it is the toxic, poisoned street supply of drugs run by criminalized manufacturers with no regulation that is killing Canadians by the thousands. Any law that does not address this reality is not health-based; it is contributing to fatalities.
Some in the current government say they believe in treating addiction as a health issue and not a criminal one. I have heard three consecutive Liberal health ministers and a Liberal Prime Minister say this many times, but they refuse to act on this claim. The Controlled Drugs and Substances Act is the law that criminalizes drug use and addiction, and it is a federal law.
I am calling out every member of the House, especially Liberals, on that contradiction tonight, because this is a contradiction that kills. They cannot say they treat drug use and addiction as a health issue and leave it criminalized on the federal books to continue to kill people.
I hope all parliamentarians stop the insanity. Let us start treating drug use and addiction as the health issue that it really is.
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