44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 9, 2024 10:00AM
- May/9/24 11:07:47 a.m.
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moved:
That, given that since the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister took office, opioid overdose deaths across Canada have increased by 166% according to the most recent data available, the House call on the Prime Minister to:
(a) proactively reject the City of Toronto's request to the federal government to make deadly hard drugs like crack, cocaine, heroin, and meth legal;
(b) reject the City of Montreal's vote calling on the federal government to make deadly hard drugs legal;
(c) deny any active or future requests from provinces, territories and municipalities seeking federal approval to make deadly hard drugs legal in their jurisdiction; and
(d) end taxpayer funded narcotics and redirect this money into treatment and recovery programs for drug addiction.
He said: Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon.
A couple of years ago, I paid a visit to the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, and I was both shocked and surprised. The shock is self-evident. Anyone who has been there would have seen the carnage of our fellow citizens lying face-first on the pavement in overdoses, the many more who stand on two feet with their heads between their legs, bent over in a spine-twisting posture that is common among those who are maxed out on fentanyl. These are spine-twisting postures that leave them bent forward, often for the rest of their lives. Those lives are often shortened, as the game of Russian roulette of using fentanyl risks ending their breathing every time they do it.
There is an unmistakable smell of too many people and too few bathrooms, with tents that go block after block after block. The police pointed to one tent, identifying it as the headquarters of the “United Nations”, a self-described gang that supplies the guns and other deadly weapons for the street. There are people screaming at the top of their lungs, having lost control of themselves while in a static state of near overdose. These things are all stunning to witness, even though one might have expected, knowing the stats, that they were all there.
We know that the Downtown Eastside was an experiment brought in by NDP municipal and provincial governments, but it was an experiment that the Prime Minister saw and said needed to be expanded right across the country. He has succeeded as, now, these tent encampments are regular in every part of the country. In your home province, Mr. Speaker, Halifax has 35 homeless encampments. That is 35 encampments in quaint, beautiful, peaceful Halifax. Every Canadian knows of such an encampment in their community, even though nine years ago it was unthinkable.
The unmistakable link between this policy and the results that I just described play out now in the rare but courageous journalism that has begun, finally, to expose the cause. I point to an article in the National Post that reads, “Miller says that her daughter Madison told her that they 'could go up to a drug addict and ask for dillies and they’d have bottles of them, because they would go into pharmacies, get them filled up and sell them to the kids.'” “Dillies” is slang for the hydromorphone that is funded by government.
A National Post article from March 11 reads:
“I had several patients who were drug-free for a long time and just couldn't resist the temptation of this very cheap hydromorphone that was now on the street,” said Dr. Michael Lester, a Toronto-based addiction physician. “Every addiction medicine doctor I have spoken to has told me that, on a daily basis in their offices, they're dealing with diverted hydromorphone, either from new clients coming in who are addicted to it, or patients of theirs that are using it as a drug of abuse.”
Global News provided rare, courageous journalism on this as well, showing that the price for a hydromorphone pill on the streets of Vancouver has dropped from $10 to 25¢ since the government began subsidizing and spreading the drug far and wide. There are reports of dealers standing outside of pharmacies waiting for those who have the prescription to get the so-called safe supply to immediately deliver it to the dealers who can then sell it to finance other terrible drugs. Then, of course, we have the overdoses that result as people graduate from those drugs.
The Prime Minister has all of this evidence. He has the evidence that, since he took office, overdose deaths are up 166% nationwide. They are up the most in the places where his and the NDP's radical policies have been most enthusiastically embraced. That is in British Columbia, where it has grown by 380%. Only with an election on the horizon did the B.C. government admit its failing and try to reverse the policy, just in time to go to the polls. However, still, Toronto and Montreal are applying for the same decriminalization of hard, illicit, unregulated drugs that caused such carnage in British Columbia, a request that the Prime Minister steadfastly refuses to rule out.
I said that I was shocked and surprised. What surprised me when I went to the Downtown Eastside were the people who greeted me there. They were not the addicts. They were not the police. They were a small platoon of activists who somehow learned of my arrival, even though it was unannounced and was not posted anywhere for either the media or the social networks. They were there to record and to follow me, and to heckle me, which is fine. I can deal with that. I do it every day.
However, it confused me. Who is paying for all this? Where is the money coming from for the activists who are pushing this? It turns out that there is a lot of money being made. Let me read a headline. “Prof, former public health officer launch company to produce legal heroin for treatment”.
Martin Schechter, who led the study, called the the North American Opiate Medication Initiative (NAOMI), and Perry Kendall, B.C.'s first public health officer, are moving to change that.
Frustrated by the lack of action from government, the two have launched a company called FPP...short for Fair Price Pharma, with the goal of producing an affordable domestic supply of legal, injectable heroin for use in treatment.
More than 5,500 British Columbians have died from illicit drug and overdoses since 2016, including 170 in May.
Dr. Schechter, who is also a professor of the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia, said in an e-mail that the overdose poisoning crisis [was a] failure to expand...legal heroin—a proven...cost-effective treatment—in the face of desperate need for safer supply, [that] drove the two doctors to act.
[They said that he has a company] to set up a dedicated facility to manufacture the product and offer it at a cost to interested health care providers, including those in other provinces.
He and Dr. Kendall are expected to meet this month with Health Canada's therapeutic products directorate, which regulates prescription drugs, to determine the tests and evidence needed to obtain a license.... They estimate they will need about $3-million to launch the product.
Of course, they are making money. Later, they would complain. “B.C. doctors upset their 'safe supply' of heroin going unprescribed during overdose crisis”. They began to lobby for more money.
This is from other news articles. Perry Kendall, the former Provincial Health Officer until 2018 is an advocate for safe supply. He founded Fair Price Pharma to distribute heroin.
Mark Tyndall, who was B.C.'s deputy provincial health officer and was an executive medical director, is the founder of MySafe project.
As I said, Martin Schechter was not with the B.C. government directly, but was responsible for the research that led to the so-called safe supply. He founded Fair Price Pharma.
These are the companies that are actually making the money and are intimidating opponents of their plan. This is turning into a gigantic, self-licking ice cream cone, one that needs to end. It is in the service of money-making and not of the public.
That is why common-sense Conservatives would stop funding hard narcotics, would ban hard drugs and would put the money into treatment and recovery services that would bring our loved ones home, drug-free.
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- 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 12:06:20 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, in today's debate, we must not forget the over 42,000 people who have died. We must also not forget their families, who have suffered as they watched their loved ones get caught in a downward spiral. I want us to have a respectful debate, where we do not use people who are sick and suffering to further a political or ideological agenda.
I want us to work on solutions, while respecting frontline workers and hearing and listening to what they have to say. For some weeks now, at the Standing Committee on Health, we have been hearing from witnesses, experts, people who work with individuals who struggle with addiction. They have been telling us about the situation.
What we can say today is that substance abuse, multiple substance abuse, is not a simple problem, and it is not first and foremost a judicial problem. It is a severe and complex public health issue. I think everyone can agree, or at least I hope they can, that drug addiction is a very insidious, chronic and multifactorial illness.
At one time, it could be said of addicts that they were slowly making their way to hell. The introduction of a synthetic opioid, fentanyl, has now tragically reduced the length of that journey. That is why I think that, in 2024, we need to call it an illicit drug crisis. That is what is causing overdoses.
This is a complex issue, and simplistic solutions are not the answer. Between 50% and 70% of addictions are associated with primary mental health problems. People need better access to first-line treatment. I will get back to this later, but the lack of investments in health care is not helping. We cannot solve a problem, discuss a problem, find solutions to a problem or measure the effectiveness of these solutions without first agreeing on the concepts involved in addressing it.
I am totally stunned this morning. I always thought that the Conservatives and the Leader of the Opposition deliberately spoke in vague terms, that they wanted people to believe that all of the parties except theirs were in favour of legalizing hard drugs. That is no small thing.
If, on their criminology 101 exam, an applicant to the criminology department was asked the difference between legalization, decriminalization and diversion and they gave the answer the Conservative leader gave earlier, that they are all the same thing, that they are just synonyms, that we are using different words that mean the same thing, that person would be rejected.
How can anyone talk about a problem when they do not even understand the concepts needed to describe and discuss reality? There is no one in the House right now who thinks we should legalize hard drugs to deal with the illicit drug crisis.
The problem, as we will see later in the analysis of the Conservative motion put forth this morning, is that the concept of legalization is being used indiscriminately. Legalizing drugs leads to the commercial production of the substances in question. All drug-related offences are removed from the Criminal Code to allow people to use drugs. It could result in commercial production and sales and freedom of purchase and use, as was the case for cannabis. Can we agree that that is far from what we want?
Decriminalizing simple possession for personal use by an addict is not at all the same thing. Can we agree on that? If we cannot agree on that, where is this debate going? What are we talking about, exactly?
Decriminalizing drug use, and by extension avoiding making a person suffering from addiction go through the judicial process, is not the same thing as legalizing drugs. It is a way of destigmatizing the addiction and giving the addict, among other things, access to services and resources. For people to get to rehab, when that is what they want, we need to be in contact with them. If they are using drugs in secret, if they cannot talk about their addiction for fear of being stigmatized at work, does anyone think they will openly ask for help if they can be criminally charged? If they were unfortunate enough to take a pill from an illicit laboratory, they could die.
What people need to know is that this disease involves relapses, and no one ever wants to talk about that. People think all it takes is a stint in rehab and the problem is solved. That is not true, because relapse is part of the healing process.
It is a complex problem. Let us imagine managing to convince someone to go to rehab. Relapse is part of the process. Let us then imagine that that person no longer has access to supervised drug sites, which is what the Harper Conservatives proposed in 2011. The Supreme Court refused and said it was important because it would be injurious to the safety of people suffering from drug addictions. If a person relapses and no longer has access to these sites, they will take illicit drugs and will have less tolerance to the drug because opioids create a dependency. They could die. People talk about harm reduction, and those who work in the field say that supervised drug sites play an important role in harm reduction. Why is that? Because of illicit drugs. They can be tested to see if they contain fentanyl.
Of course, we need to deal with the issues arising from sharing spaces in the community. People who do not have a drug problem should not be left holding the bag. However, that does not negate an entire strategy based first and foremost, let us not forget, on prevention. It is not simply a matter of preventing drug use. It is also a question of preventing relapses, avoiding stigmatization and fostering social reintegration.
There is an incredible new project in my riding: a refurbished Uniatox. I am a little emotional. For the first time, this organization is going to work toward preventing relapses. There are not a lot of projects like that.
An utterly simplistic approach would be to stay away from harm reduction altogether. Just send people to detox, and then expect them to man up or woman up and deal with their life issues. This, however, is not the way to go. People will relapse. Supervised consumption sites do help people stabilize their drug use.
Harm reduction is one of the four pillars. I also talked about prevention. In this opioid crisis, a single pill can kill a person, so recriminalizing drugs will not solve the problem. That has absolutely nothing to do with it. I could go out on the street right now and get a black market pill. It has nothing to do with decriminalization.
There are a lot of overdoses in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and New Brunswick. Quebec does not have quite as many, according to the statistics I saw, but we have to be careful with that. Harm reduction also means safe supply. Why? Because we need to save lives, because illicit drugs kill. As far as I know, the fourth pillar, enforcement, is still not very effective.
In fact, for 50 years the repressive war on drugs approach solved nothing. If we compare the U.S. model to Portugal’s, we see that the United States is far behind. Still, is there a country more hostile to decriminalizing simple possession and more hostile to diversion? I have yet to speak about diversion, but that is what Bill C-5 called for, diversion measures.
To continue with the U.S.-Portugal comparison, Portugal had one million heroin addicts and a shocking public health problem surrounding HIV transmission. They decriminalized, but they did not put the cart before the horse. They did not simply ease their consciences by going the diversion route and standing pat. We must invest money, redouble support measures, and hire social workers, frontline workers and street workers. More controlled-supply centres are needed, and we must constantly adapt and course-correct.
I see people saying that the BC pilot project is terrible. It is indeed terrible, but is it the decriminalization that is terrible? No, it is the fact that they are facing a crisis that no one here would be able to solve with a snap of their fingers. Everyone needs to work together. Yes, the people in British Columbia need to make some changes, but decriminalization does not necessarily mean people can use wherever they want. This can be regulated. I imagine this is where they are headed. Furthermore, there can be no denying the problems of sharing spaces with the community.
I made myself a crib sheet about the legal pillar. We were taught this in criminology back in the day. At one end, there is criminalization. At the other end, there is legalization. That is a spectrum. On the criminalization side, there is the death penalty. Is there a more severe punishment than a death sentence? Then there is incarceration, followed by fines.
Next up, we slowly go into the diversion and decriminalization spectrum. This could involve supervised consumption, the possibility of diverting the person before the courts, targeted interventions by the police, formal cautions, administrative penalties and fines. There can be decriminalization of simple possession, which is not yet legalization. Next, there is regulation of retail sale and of commercial production, and then legalization. That is legalization. One can say that this constitutes a spectrum.
When I hear the opposition leader say it is all the same thing, I have to tell him no, it is not the same thing. There are tables available. A little reading would help. It is as though I said that the death penalty was the same as incarceration. No, there are different measures, there is differentiation within the decriminalization spectrum, including diversion measures. This is what Montreal and Quebec have gone with, diversion.
Bill C‑5 contained an important provision that included a diversion measure for simple possession offences. Among other things, it led to the implementation of the pilot project in British Columbia, which started in January 2023 and just ended. Has it really ended? The answer is yes and no, because I expect they are going to make the necessary adjustments.
For anyone who is unaware, this crisis has been growing since 2016 and spiked during the pandemic. Why? Because people were isolated then. When someone overdoses while they are alone, they cannot self-administer naloxone. Furthermore, unless people use in supervised consumption sites, they cannot get naloxone.
The motion is incorrect. Let us examine point (a).
(a) proactively reject the City of Toronto's request to the federal government to make deadly hard drugs like crack, cocaine, heroin, and meth legal;
The statement is incorrect. Last January, the City of Toronto submitted a new version of its drug decriminalization plan to Health Canada, and the city is working on decriminalization, not legalization.
(b) reject the City of Montreal's vote calling on the federal government to make deadly hard drugs legal;
Similarly, Montreal is working on diversion measures, in collaboration with police forces and public health, so that frontline workers, everyone together, can coordinate their work. There are problems, of course, but everyone needs to work together, and they will. However, we are a long way from decriminalization and even further from legalization.
(c) deny any active or future requests from provinces, territories and municipalities seeking federal approval to make deadly hard drugs legal in their jurisdiction;
Once again, this is ridiculous, utterly ridiculous. No one is talking about legalization, but rather decriminalization, and even then, not everyone is calling for decriminalization. Some jurisdictions have thought about the issue, have changed their minds and are choosing greater co-operation among stakeholders in the field, with diversion measures, to avoid clogging up the courts with people who really should not be in prison but should be getting treatment, because prisons are not therapeutic places. People are coming together to say that they will continue to work collaboratively to try to gradually resolve any issues they may have related to sharing a space in the community.
(d) end taxpayer funded narcotics and redirect this money into treatment and recovery programs for drug addiction.
This is basically saying that taxpayers are funding the opioid and overdose crisis. That is not what is happening. This program was put in place to prevent deaths, and evidence shows that safe supply is actually reducing overdoses right now. Imagine how much worse the crisis would be without it.
I have to stop there.
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