44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 9, 2024 10:00AM
- May/9/24 3:53:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I stand by our leader when we talk about banning hard drugs.
We are talking about deviation. When pharmaceutical companies are giving a prescribed opioid to a consumer, deviation means that that drug is finding its way into the market. That is happening. When we talk about decriminalization, that is exactly what has happened in Vancouver and what the Toronto mayor wants to do, which is to allow hard drugs on the streets.
We are against all of that. We want drugs off the street. We want treatment and recovery for Canadians. Semantics matter. The fact is that we are the only party that I am hearing in the House today saying that we want to ban hard drugs, and then focus all of that money on detox and recovery. We are the only party saying it. That is semantics.
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- May/9/24 3:55:02 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, if the member listened to my speech, I have spoken to those individuals. I have talked to hundreds of them, but also, most importantly, the people on the front lines: the police, the mental health responders, and those who are running the community groups. We have a group from the Bridge Street United Church that is actually in the middle of this opioid epidemic and the overdose situation. They watched seven people in line collapse from drug use.
The bigger thing that is happening, when we look at what is happening with drugs, is that when we give criminals an inch, they take a mile, and now they are lacing drugs with horse tranquilizer. When I am talking to the individuals on the front lines, they are saying the drugs are getting worse.
All we are saying is, let us give a mile to the people suffering from it and to the frontline responders, and let us give only an inch to the criminals. That is not a slogan; it is just common sense.
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- May/9/24 4:09:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to know my colleague's opinion on the impact of the Conservatives' rhetoric, demagoguery and lies and the lack of scientific content in the opioid file.
I would like my colleague to tell me what impact this could have on drug users.
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- May/9/24 4:11:24 p.m.
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Uqaqtittiji, the member has responded partly to what I was going to ask her regarding whether she thinks the opioid crisis is a health issue or a criminal justice issue, specifically because the NDP did introduce a bill that would treat the toxic drug crisis as a health issue. I wonder if the member could instead explain, if this is a health issue, why the Liberal government is spending 60% of the budget on law enforcement.
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- May/9/24 4:38:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, oddly enough, there was disorder and chaos at the Standing Committee on Health today, much as there is on the streets in many parts of Canada because of the careless NDP-Liberal drug policies. Certainly, the NDP-Liberal coalition decided it wanted to be disruptive, and that is not the type of committee my colleagues and I wish to participate in. Of course, that is not the kind of room the Speaker wishes to run here either.
Again, on this side of the House, we believe the problem with substance use disorder is a medical problem. We will continue to put forth important and meaningful solutions based in science to help all Canadian citizens.
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- May/9/24 5:09:19 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise with a great deal of empathy and sadness about the issue under debate here, because what we are talking about is an issue that brings and reflects great pain in every family in every corner of the country.
The thing about addiction is that no family is untouched. It does not respect income. It does not respect culture. It does not respect class. It does not respect geography. It hits every family. I do not believe there is a family in this country that is untouched by addiction. Everybody has a mother, father, brother, sister, cousin, aunt, uncle, child, friend or neighbour who has suffered from substance abuse disorder. Therefore I think this is one of those policies that is particularly unfortunate when it is politicized, when people seek to make partisan gain and when we do not seek to find common ground by getting established facts before us so we can make the best policy for this country moving forward.
I have heard a lot of words from the Conservatives, because the motion today is theirs, and they have used the word “extreme” a lot. I will tell them what I think is an extreme policy: the war on drugs. The funny thing about it, though, is that we have a century of evidence, a hundred years of the war on drugs, the criminalized approach to addiction. If it has proven anything, it has proven that we cannot jail our way out of addiction. It has proven that it does not work.
If the war on drugs did work, North America would be relatively addiction-free today. We have wasted billions of dollars in North America over the last hundred years, and we have hurt millions of addicts and their families. The result is that addiction is as big a part of our society today as it ever was.
It is said in recovery circles that the definition of “insanity” is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. What do the Conservatives bring to the debate today, a day when 20 families will lose a family member, and they will lose a family member tomorrow and the day after? The Conservatives think the answer here is “Let us recriminalize addiction.”
If we get right to the bottom of it, the problem is actually relatively easy to state. People are dying from illicit substances. They are dying from the use of drugs, primarily fentanyl and sometimes carfentanil, and the reason they are dying is that there is a toxic, poisoned street supply that is provided by organized criminals in Canada and abroad who do not care one bit about the quality, the dosage or the purity of their product or about who buys it.
Also, because the drugs happen to be supplied largely by organized crime, the price is astronomically increased, meaning that a person who is dependent on these drugs and who is suffering from late-stage addiction has to engage in break and enters, or in some cases in selling their bodies, in order to get the amount of money they need every day to satisfy their habit. The answer to this is obviously that we need to make sure that people who have a chronic compulsion to use these drugs because of their health issue and addiction have access to a regulated supply of the substances they need that is in known dosage, known titration and known purity.
There are 35 problems with addiction. Making sure that people have access to a safe, regulated supply will solve only two of them. The other 33 problems will still be there. The first problem that will be solved is that a person would not have to buy their drugs from a street criminal in an alley in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver at two in the morning and not know what they are getting.
A story that happens every day in Vancouver is that a person uses a substance that has been contaminated because it has been made in an illegal pill mill by people who have no concern about whether half of the pill had half of the fentanyl in it. If someone splits the pill in half and accidentally takes the half that has two-thirds of the fentanyl in it, they will overdose.
Thus, the first problem that would be solved is that people would no longer have to go to organized crime to get their drugs. In my view, they should be able to go to a pharmacy, which is a place in our society where dangerous regulated drugs are sold. They should be able to go to a professional dispenser, which is a pharmacist, and they should be able at least to access the drugs that they need with their own money through the pharmacy, if they are going to get them at all. In my view, that is a more sensible way to dispense a dangerous drug than to leave it to organized crime.
The second problem that safe supply solves is that if it were sold at a reasonable price, the person probably would not have to break into garages or cars, sell their body or shoplift in order to make the $200 a day that the average person in Vancouver often needs in order to get drugs in the illicit market.
Every other problem would still exist, the plurality of health problems. I agree with the Conservatives in part. I think we all agree, and I believe strongly in investing in treatment. However, this brings me to a very important point that I think marks a cleavage in the House between us and the Conservatives. We believe that substance use disorder is a health issue, not a criminal issue. It is not an issue of morality. It is not an issue of character. It does not mean that a person who uses drugs is a bad person; it means they have a complex biopsychosocial condition that requires treatment.
One thing I will agree with the Conservatives about is that we have not created the health architecture in this country that actually mirrors that belief. I believe that there should be treatment on demand for anybody who is ready to get treatment through our public health care system.
I challenge my Conservative colleagues: If and when they are in government at some point, I want them to invest billions of dollars into our public health care system so when a person seeks treatment, they can walk into a facility and get it right then. We know that if someone does not access treatment right away, they probably will not do it at all.
I want to just say quickly a few words about Moms Stop the Harm because I was actually horrified to hear some of the Conservatives disparage Moms Stop the Harm. It is a group of mothers who lost children to drug overdose. There was an aspersion cast, suggesting that it was somehow falsely created as a Liberal-NDP front group. Not only is that 100%, demonstrably, completely, categorically false, but what a disgusting insult it is to parents in this country who have mobilized because they lost a child to drug addiction. The Conservatives owe an apology to Moms Stop the Harm and to every parent in this country who has lost a child to drug addiction.
I have never said this before in the House. I lost my father in 1983 on December 6. I was 20 years old when my 15-year-old sister found him dead in the bathroom from a methadone overdose. I lost a parent, and my family has been wracked with addiction and substance use issues.
We should never play politics with any parent or other family member who is advocating policy they think is better and who has suffered the death of a loved one.
I would like to move “That the motion be amended by replacing the words ‘the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister took office’ with ‘2015’, and replacing all the words after ‘call on the Prime Minister to:’ with the following: (a) declare the toxic drug crisis a national public health emergency; (b) take steps to hold pharmaceutical companies responsible for their role in contributing to Canada's toxic drug crisis; (c) provide additional funding to help provinces provide supports for treatment and recovery programs, targeting provinces where drug toxicity deaths are increases fastest, such as Saskatchewan and Alberta; and (d) work with cities including Toronto and Montreal to ensure that they have all the tools they need to tackle this crisis and to protect public safety.”
Let us put politics aside and try to create drug policy in this country that would save lives.
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- May/9/24 5:24:10 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the member for raising that issue because I was quite shocked when I heard those words in the House. I cannot be any stronger than I was in my initial remarks when I said that it is categorically untrue. The aspersion and the insinuation that Moms Stop The Harm is anything but a grassroots independent group of people who have come together, united in their sharing of the horrible experience of losing a child to addiction, is frankly, disgraceful. It is not worthy of anybody in the House to say that.
Any money that is given to that group simply helps it to spread its message, and its message is that they know that their children often used alone after accessing street-level toxic drugs and that is why they died. That is why Moms Stop The Harm is advocating for sensible, evidence-based drug policy in this country, which means that people, as one of the pillars, must be able get access to a safe, regulated supply.
I would ask this question of my Conservative friends: What is the alternative to safe supply? A dangerous supply—
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