44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 9, 2024 10:00AM
- May/9/24 11:23:15 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, when I was 10 years old, I had a similar experience in Gastown, British Columbia, in the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver. I remember driving in with my mom for the very first time and being shocked about the chaos and despair I saw, even as a young boy. Anyone who goes to that neighbourhood in Vancouver sees that chaos. Unfortunately, now, that addictions crisis has spread right across the country and into every community in British Columbia. People are struggling. People are dying, and something needs to change. However, 15 months ago, this Liberal-NDP government launched a wacko, hard-drug legalization policy that has led to even more crime, more chaos, more drugs and more disorder, especially in British Columbia.
While the opioid addiction crisis has accelerated in severity in recent years, it is not a new problem. In 2009, Doctors of BC, formerly known as the BC Medical Association, published a policy paper entitled “Stepping Forward: Improving Addiction Care in BC ”. The paper made 10 recommendations, including “Formally recognizing addiction as a chronic, treatable disease under the BC Primary Care Charter and the BC Chronic Disease Management Program”.
The recommendations state, and this is crucial, “Create and fund 240 new flexible medically supervised detoxification spaces”, as well as “Fund the development of 600 new addiction-treatment beds across the province”.
Fifteen years later, the availability of treatment beds has not improved. In fact, it has only gotten worse. However, nowhere in that paper did it suggest that making drugs like fentanyl, heroin, crack and meth legal would help British Columbians.
Today, the leading cause of death for youth aged 10 to 18 in my province is overdose; it is drug toxicity. Let that sink in. In 2023, more than 2,500 British Columbians lost their lives to illicit drug overdoses. More than six British Columbians lose their life every day due to deadly drugs. Since 2016, there have been 42,000 people lost to the opioid crisis across Canada, and since the Prime Minister took office, opioid overdose deaths have increased 166%.
The main argument the government has made in support of this reckless legalization and decriminalization policy was that it would reduce the stigma surrounding addiction. In reality, it has only made that stigma worse. Canadians are good people. They are compassionate people, but that compassion is evaporating quickly as crime and chaos increase in conjunction with the radical policies of the government, and I will give an example.
Last October, the Abbotsford Soccer Association published an open letter to the City of Abbotsford, decrying the state of their fields and calling for change. It reads:
The state of sports facilities, especially soccer pitches, within the city, is nothing short of lamentable.
It goes on to say this:
Abbotsford Soccer Association (ASA) members are witnessing an increased incidence of individuals with substance abuse disorder loitering on the grounds of [Matsqui rec centre] which has subsequently led to the increased presence of drug apparatus scattered on the fields and surrounding walkways including syringes and needles, and shattered crack pipes and liquor bottles.
It is not acceptable for any parent or any child to face those conditions when going to play sports.
The letter goes on to outline that community parks are the most common place for children to be injured by dirty needles and that children “imitate the behaviours” that they see around them. In other words, what is happening at Matsqui rec centre is normalizing drug behaviour, and kids are being exposed to that.
The government knew from the start that its wacko policy of allowing open drug use in public would put children at risk, but it went ahead with it anyway. That is shameful, and it is a complete dereliction of its duty to protect children.
At the Legion in Mission, veterans have to clean up dirty needles and have to ask people to stop smoking crack on their property, daily. That goes for every business in the downtown Mission core. It is like the Liberal government has created a crack tax because their windows are shattered, and they have to have haz-mat materials on site to clean up because of the possibility of fentanyl.
In Mission, there was an addictions clinic operated by Dr. Larina Reyes-Smith, which provided addictions care, STI screening, counselling and more. Dr. Reyes-Smith is a strong advocate for increased access to detox treatment and treatment of mental illness rather than the so-called safe supply model being pursued by the government and the Province of B.C. In October, she came to me distressed because she was forced to close her clinic due to high costs and a lack of support from the provincial government, which did not understand her approach to wraparound care, nor the quality of care she gave to those people desperate to get off drugs and live a better life.
Physicians continue to speak out, saying that treatment funding needs to be under the same umbrella as primary care so it can be billed to provincial health coverage, but that, frustratingly, is not the case. Even in publicly funded detox centres, patients are charged a per diem out of pocket, making it extremely challenging for those struggling with addiction to access life-saving treatment.
Why is the emphasis not on bolstering the number of addictions doctors rather than on legalizing hard drugs and leaving people to die on their own? Why is the focus not on building the infrastructure we so desperately need in order to address the crisis?
The opioid crisis is not limited just to B.C. either. Last fall, the town of Belleville, Ontario, declared a state of emergency after 23 people overdosed in two days. Belleville is only a little bit bigger than Mission. In a town of just over 50,000 people, 23 people overdosed in just under 48 hours. Again, let that sink in. This is the stuff being normalized in Canada. Thirteen of the overdoses took place in just two hours.
Now the government is contemplating allowing more cities and provinces to make the same mistake British Columbia did. As a British Columbian, I am scared that the Prime Minister will expand this wacko policy and that other provincial governments will make the same mistake ours did. That is why the Conservatives today are calling for the government to do four things. The first is to proactively and clearly reject the City of Toronto's request to the federal government to make deadly hard drugs like crack cocaine, heroin and meth legal.
Secondly, the motion calls on the Prime Minister to “reject the City of Montreal's vote calling on the federal government to make deadly hard drugs legal.”
Third is to deny any active or future requests from provinces, territories and municipalities seeking federal approval to make deadly hard drugs legal in their jurisdiction. Fourth is to end taxpayer-funded narcotics and redirect the money into treatment and recovery programs for drug addiction.
Every day, 22 Canadians lose their life to this deadly crisis, and the government is only making the problem worse. Therefore I call on all members of the House to support our motion today and put an end to the wacko and deadly hard drug legalization experiment once and for all so we can focus on getting people access to the treatment, recovery and supports they desperately need.
Canadians love that our country is peaceful. They love an orderly country. That is being taken away from them because of the radical ideological approach. Let us bring our loved ones home.
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- May/9/24 11:33:47 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as I outlined in my speech, the crisis we are facing is not limited just to British Columbia. I think the real question the member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith needs to consider is why her ideologically extreme premier, Mr. Eby, has done a 180 on the policy. That goes to the very point I made in my speech, which is that parents do not want drug addiction normalized in our communities. Parents want to be able to go to downtown Nanaimo, downtown Mission or downtown Abbotsford and access a recreational centre without being fearful of being exposed to a methamphetamine.
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- May/9/24 11:36:00 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, a bit earlier the leader of the Conservative Party refused to explain the difference between legalization and decriminalization. The latter does not allow people to consume drugs wherever they want. Rather, it ensures that people with a drug problem are not systematically dealt with by the prison system and can get the care they need. This all stems from the fact that drug dependency or addiction is a public health issue.
I would simply like to know—
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- May/9/24 11:36:53 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Conservative Party leader refused to answer the question by one of my colleagues, who asked him to give us the definition for legalization as opposed to decriminalization. This is important in the debate we are currently having.
Decriminalization does not allow people to systematically consume drugs everywhere. It allows us to ensure, in cases substance abuse, that the person will not necessarily go to prison, but can receive adequate care. We consider drug addiction to be a public health issue.
My question for the member is simple: Does he consider drug addiction to be a public health issue?
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- May/9/24 11:37:33 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Bloc Québécois member did not listen to my speech today. I said it was a problem. The 2009 report that I mentioned states that the government has to start treating drug addiction like other chronic diseases.
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- May/9/24 11:53:00 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am really happy that we are having this debate because, today, I am thinking of so many loved ones across this country who are grieving the loss of their family member or friend, people like Carolyn Karle in Thunder Bay, who lost her daughter Dayna almost a year into her recovery. Dayna relapsed one night with alcohol. Then she took one dose of a substance that she thought was cocaine and tragically died of an opioid overdose later that night. That devastating loss left her mother determined to help others who struggle with substance use disorder, a condition that far too many of us know is chronic and reoccurring, but treatable.
Substance use-related disorder has been with us for a very long time. Opioid overdoses have been climbing over the past two decades, but since the pandemic, deaths have risen to an alarming 22 people a day. That is 22 circles of devastated friends and families a day. The drug crisis is marked by pain and a desperate need to do something. Easy solutions that sound like they are tough on crime have been found to do nothing to reduce harm and to save lives. We cannot incarcerate our way out of this pain and loss.
Unfortunately, today, we are debating a tired idea that has actually contributed to the ongoing crisis, an idea to starve out the problem, ignore any science and go back, way back, to a manner of talking about drugs that is harmful and ignorant, that will create more shame and disgust for substance users. The Conservative Party need not worry. I have yet to meet someone who uses substances problematically that is not already suffering from those feelings, and I have yet to meet a grieving parent who would not do anything at all to help their children see their value and reach towards recovery.
To treat substance use and reduce related harms for people and communities, there is no one silver bullet. In the early 2000s, I was the author of the Thunder Bay drug strategy. Through that work with treatment professionals, law enforcement, support workers and public health prevention experts, we came to model our strategy on the international research that says, to save lives and reduce harm to people and communities, we need to follow four pillars that work together: prevention, treatment, enforcement and harm reduction. Indeed, we added a fifth pillar of housing, as it became clear that a place to call home was the foundation of healing. I note that Conservative members have voted against housing approaches as well.
Last fall, our government launched the renewed Canada drugs and substances strategy, which offers a comprehensive, collaborative, compassionate and evidence-based drug policy. Using the advice of that strategy, informed by the cross-section of professionals, the Government of Canada announced over $1 billion in funding, including almost $600 million through Health Canada's substance use and addictions program. This supports frontline workers for treatment, harm reduction, prevention and to reduce stigma. That is money going directly to people and their families, so that they can heal. The money also funds research and surveillance initiatives and supports stronger law enforcement capacity to address illegal drug production and trafficking.
Substance use is a complex issue and Canadians use drugs for many reasons. Not everyone who uses drugs is suffering from an addiction. Indeed, many people who use drugs are sporadic users, which is why the toxic supply is so dangerous.
For people with addictions, the right kinds of treatment services may not be available or affordable. Barriers to treatment are often unseen. Some people face particular challenges, based on their own unique circumstances. Marginalized groups are often victims of stigmatization or prejudice, which places them at higher risk, including youth, indigenous peoples, racialized communities and LGBTQ+ people.
Putting one's hand up for help is very hard. Society still places huge judgment on people with addictions and throwing around words like “addict”, a word we have heard far too frequently from the Leader of the Opposition, actually continues that pattern of shaming. Shame is toxic too. It drives solitary use, silence and withdrawal from family and community.
Recovery looks different for everyone. I ask everyone in the House if they have ever struggled with a problematic substance or behaviour. Do they eat too much? Do they shop too much? Have they ever felt out of control with gambling? The list goes on. It is helpful for us to think of those times when we have been out of balance, because it gives us a glimpse into the “why” of addiction and empathy for the struggle to regain balance.
I can tell members that every person I have met who has lost a loved one would do anything to have another chance to keep that individual alive. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this crisis. We need a range of supports that help, no matter if a person is using, contemplating how to get better or ready to step into recovery.
That is why harm reduction is so important, because we cannot treat someone if he or she is dead. Harm-reduction measures, such as supervised consumption sites and in-person or virtual spotting services, take-home naloxone and drug-checking technologies, keep people connected to services so they know they matter.
In 2016, there was only one supervised consumption site in Canada, and Stephen Harper tried over and over to shut it down. Thankfully, the courts agreed that the lives of drug users matter too.
Since then, our focus on saving lives means that we have approved 41 consumption sites in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec. At these sites, workers have prevented over 53,000 overdoses, with close to 4.5 million independent visits. That is a lot of people who want to live, but this motion says they are not worthy of that support, that they do not get another chance for a healthier day.
We also support a network of 45 treatment centres and services in the majority of first nations and Inuit communities across Canada: 82 sites that provide wraparound treatment and 75 mental wellness teams that serve 385 first nations and Inuit communities.
Although the Conservative opposition will tell people otherwise, harm reduction is actually treatment. When people feel seen and supported, they make connections. When people use a clean needle or inject a substance under the watch of a nurse, it means they want to live. At supervised consumption sites in Canada, there have been more than 424,000 referrals to health and social services. Harm reduction is a bridge to a better day.
The Leader of the Opposition wants to go back to the days of the war on drugs, but what he is actually proposing is a war on substance users, people and their families, people who suffer and people who hope for a brighter tomorrow.
Today, I say these words in defence of the families grieving the loss of their loved ones. I say it for the parents, like my dear friend Calvin Fors in Thunder Bay, who lost his young son to an accidental overdose; we remember Reilly. No more deaths like Reilly or Dayna, that has to be the focus. Compassion matters, evidence matters, connection matters and cruelty will not help people heal. It never has, and we have that evidence loud and clear.
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- May/9/24 12:33:48 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Montcalm for his speech, which was enlightening as always, because he himself is enlightened and well versed in his files. It is a pleasure to hear him speak.
This morning, several of us tried to get the Conservatives to explain the difference between decriminalization, legalization and diversion. They were unwilling to answer the question. However, we got the beginnings of a response when I asked one of my colleagues whether we were witnessing a public health crisis and he replied that drug addiction is a chronic disease.
My question is simple: Once we start to view drug addiction as a chronic disease, how can we do anything but decriminalize addicts' behaviour if we want to ensure that they receive proper treatment instead of throwing them in jail?
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- May/9/24 1:46:40 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member and I care about our residents. We want to make sure they live their lives to the fullest capacity. Any strategy with regard to the treatment of addiction needs to have the four pillars of prevention, harm reduction, treatment and enforcement. We need to have a holistic approach.
Unfortunately, the hon. member and their colleagues are actually ignoring the former adviser to the former prime minister, who said that the plan put forward by the official opposition is not actually a plan. It is a plan for failure, and that is not the approach to take to such a serious issue and politicize it, much as the opposition party is doing.
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- May/9/24 3:38:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is interesting that more people have died of overdose in British Columbia in the first three months of 2024 than in all of 2015. More than six people die in British Columbia every day due to an overdose. It is absolutely incumbent on each and every one of us legislators to adopt a recovery-oriented system of care, providing hope for people who are struggling with addiction, and offer them off-ramps so they can pursue recovery.
British Columbia did not just tweak the program; it effectively gutted it, admitting it was an abject failure and demanding the federal government rescue the province from this failure. Unfortunately, I am not going to take any lessons from the Government of B.C. on how to handle the addiction crisis.
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- May/9/24 3:40:35 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the tragic overdose crisis that is gripping our country, and the addiction crisis, are very serious issues. There are some very stark differences with the approaches on how to handle this serious, tragic issue.
Conservatives believe that people have the capacity to recover from addiction. We believe we need to support people in pursuing recovery through detox, treatment and a recovery-oriented system of care. It is very obvious that the NDP-Liberal coalition does not believe in supporting people in those endeavours. Unfortunately, people's lives are lost as a direct result.
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- May/9/24 4:12:58 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise in the House.
I want to take a moment just before I begin my formal speech to recognize and honour a young friend of mine. I met him as an infant, and I performed his funeral last summer. He was 22 years of age, and his name is Marek Seamus Henderson Pekarik. He died as a victim, as a person who was addicted to opioids and other drugs. He died, really, in the prime of his very young life.
Marek came from a fine family. He was very close to both his parents and has a wonderful sister. He was really able to light up a room every time he walked in, with his imagination and his fun. However, there was always an insecurity there, and there was always something that led him to want to be part of a group. That part of the group that he got into led him onto a pathway that led to an addiction. Part of that addiction may have been hereditary; one never knows about addiction. Ultimately, a tainted drug supply led to his death just over a year ago.
His family is still grieving. His friends are still grieving. I am still grieving. I wanted to raise his name in the House today because this is not just about giving family and friends a nod to say that we acknowledge their grief or their pain. This pain and grief in this opioid crisis is very real for many people.
No pain or grief should ever be politicized. This is one of those issues where we should learn how to work together. We should find a way to look outside our political differences and to look at a crisis that is affecting people every day in our provinces, our communities and our cities. We need to open up a door to look at the fact that there is no silver bullet in this battle. There needs to be a multipronged approach in a way that we get best evidence and that we find a way to ensure that we use that best evidence to get a plethora of treatments, options and ideas to attack the problem, because one size does not fit all.
Let me be very clear. The ever-changing, illegal, toxic drug supply is a primary factor driving this crisis, and too many people are losing their lives as a result of it. That is why Marek died.
Of course, there are underlying issues all the time. Of course, there are easy and facile answers that are going to be offered to people. The reality is that we have to get bad drugs off our streets and away from Canadians, as 22 Canadians lose their lives every day in this unrelenting, tragic crisis. These are sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, nieces and nephews, and aunts and uncles. They are grandparents. It is being driven by the increasingly toxic and unpredictable, illegal drug supply in Canada, which is killing, on average, 22 Canadians a day.
We have to use every tool at our disposal. That means we will not have perfection on any one tool. We have to find ways to do prevention, to find ways to address addiction in the very early stages, to understand that this is a health crisis and to help people as human beings. It means that we need to provide treatment.
That needs to be on-demand treatment, and we are not there yet. The federal government continues to supply money to provinces, to communities, to have more and better treatment. We are not there yet, but treatment is a critical part of this. Harm reduction is also part of it. We simply do not want people to die.
This is not a moral issue, and it is not primarily a legal issue. It is a health crisis, and people are dying. It is the same as people dying of cancer, of heart disease, of obesity and of so many factors in our world where people are dying. We need to have a medical approach that does not further stigmatize people who are already suffering in their lives.
This debate is doing nothing to further that issue. It is doing nothing to help the people who are the victims in this horrendous case. We need to focus on prevention. We need to focus on treatment, harm reduction and enforcement. All four factors are the central pillars of our government's approach. They need to be based on reason and on evidence. They need to develop best practices. We need to have an international lens to see what works and what does not work. We will make mistakes in things that work. We will honestly do that, but we will continue to learn every day as we try to solve this crisis together.
We need to look at emerging practices and solutions from around the globe, and we need to listen to the professionals who are engaged. That does mean law enforcement officers, but more than that, it means physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners and therapists. It needs to engage psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and street workers, the people who are listening, and it needs to involve the families of victims, people who love their children, who love their parents and who see the day-to-day destruction in their lives.
Our policies are not driving this problem. Anyone who says that does not understand the problem and has not spent time on the streets, in hospitals, in treatment centres or in prisons, where we see the effects of this horrible overdose crisis. It means they have not been at the funerals where I have been and that I have performed to actually deal with the outcomes of this horrendous problem.
To say our policies are contributing to it is simply incorrect. We know what the factors are, not all the factors, but most of the factors of addictions, and we are addressing them as root causes. We understand the complex issue around police enforcement, and we are working around the clock, and around the world, on enforcement. We also want best practices in understanding how it is that we are to get to the victims to make sure they are not further stigmatized and further hurt. We want to help, not to hurt. We know, primarily, that we want to stop deaths. The first way to do that is to stop toxic, illegal drug supply, the kinds of drugs that are getting to people and that are killing people.
According to the latest national data, 82% of overdose deaths involved illegal fentanyl. This percentage has increased by 44% since 2016. That was when national surveillance actually began. I note that because it was just after the Liberal government took office. We were not getting the data we needed before the government took office. Now, we are getting better data to surveil this situation and to understand best practices. It is the illegal drug supply that is contaminated with toxic levels of illegal opioids, other drugs, that is at the root cause of the overdose crisis in Canada.
To suggest that our programs simply hand out prescription drugs to anyone, including youth, is simply not true. It is not a fact. It is wrong. The clients of those programs are already using drugs and are struggling with addictions. They need care. They need help. They need the ability to fight their disease and to be given time so that compassionate, hopeful people can embrace them in love and can work with them in a medical way to ensure that they combat their addictions.
It means we need roads to recovery as well. We need pathways to recovery and need treatment on demand, but it does not matter that treatment on demand is available if people are dead. They are dying from toxic drug supply. They have been marginalized in the medical system. They need to be brought home. They need to be recognized as part of the medical system in our country, where professionals are able to meet them with no judgment, no stigma and certainly not with the political jargon or rhetoric that we hear today from across the other side of the House. It means absolute training for primary caregivers and primary medical service providers to ensure that they have the best tools and the time to do their work.
We hear a concern from the other side that there is a diversion of drugs from these programs. That is simply not true. Diversion is illegal, and steps are always being taken to stop it. We take those concerns seriously. We take them very seriously, and we encourage law enforcement officers to do best practices to counter that at every opportunity.
The Conservatives are portraying a fiction that our streets are flooded by prescribed alternative medications. There is no data to say that. What we need to do is to continue to ensure that diversion does not happen and that people have a span of time in their lives to get the treatment they need, to work on the healthy lives they want to live, to make sure that people like young Marek do not meet their deaths without options for treatment.
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- May/9/24 4:26:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that comment gives me a chance to give a shout-out to an organization in my riding called Families for Addiction Recovery, FAR. It is made up of parents whose kids have been in engaged in illegal drugs and often had addictions. This group particularly has talked about this as a medical crisis. As long as we do not see it as a medical crisis and do medical interventions, but see it as a legal crisis, we will never get ahead.
That further stigmatizes and pushes people away from getting the care the want. It excludes people from society. It pushes them away, and we need to bring them home. We need to bring them love. We need to bring them compassion. Stigma will never do that. What we need to do is to ensure that groups, like Families for Addiction Recovery, have the tools they need to be a community-based group, and we will do that work. I am proud to support them.
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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 5:20:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague, with whom I had the privilege of sitting on the health committee for a number of years. I just want to tell him that I am very sorry to hear about his dad. I have lost both of my parents, not to overdose, but I understand the profound pain that comes from losing one's parents. I also understand the profound pain that comes from having family members with addiction.
Addiction is something that is incredibly challenging for each and every one of us. A mom wrote to me, and I shared this today in the health committee. She said, “Hi. Sorry it's been so long. I've been in survival mode, fighting to save my daughter. Her 13-year-old friend just died yesterday, here in rural British Columbia, from an overdose after the local hospital released her from an overdose on Friday. Please help us here. I can't bear going to another child's funeral. These kids deserve so much more than this ignorant system. Doctors should have held her, under the Mental Health Act, until they could have gone to detox. Another family ruined, many who loved her, traumatized, and more deaths to follow if something does not change.”
Does the member agree that there should be an expansion of detox in his home province of British Columbia?
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