Bill C-2 (Historical)

Respect for Communities Act

An Act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act

This enactment amends the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to, among other things,
(a) create a separate exemption regime for activities involving the use of a controlled substance or precursor that is obtained in a manner not authorized under this Act;
(b) specify the purposes for which an exemption may be granted for those activities; and
(c) set out the information that must be submitted to the Minister of Health before the Minister may consider an application for an exemption in relation to a supervised consumption site.

Political Party Financing

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am seeking unanimous consent for a very urgent motion. I think all members of the House know that the opioid crisis is a national health emergency taking the lives of Canadians on a daily basis.

Although it has taken a year, the government has tabled a bill that moves us in the right direction by, among other things, repealing the previous government's Bill C-2. The NDP believes there is a critical and irrefutable need to get this bill passed as soon as possible. It will save lives. Therefore, I am asking for unanimous consent for the following motion.

I move that, notwithstanding any Standing Order or usual practice of the House, Bill C-37, an act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and to make related amendments to other acts shall be deemed to have been read a second time and referred to committee of the whole, deemed considered in committee of the whole, deemed reported without amendment, deemed concurred in at report stage, and deemed read a third time and passed.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

I'll do a quick question, absolutely.

This question may be hard to answer, but it's not a long question in itself. Previously, when all the provisions of Bill C-2 were in place, there were concerns about an extended timeline to approve supervised consumption sites.

Can you comment in general terms on how removing these barriers is going to change the timeline for approval of a new site? How much time will be saved by these changes?

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

I'd also like to thank the member for restoring harm reduction as a key pillar of this issue. As my honourable colleague just talked about, there are a number of different conditions that affect Canadians, from the devastating impacts of thalidomide to the current problem of opioid addiction in this country.

Minister, as you know, in 2015 the Liberal Party publicly stated that the Conservative Bill C-2 was a deliberate barrier to opening safe injection sites. Of course, it was, because we know that not a single safe injection site has been opened since that legislation was passed.

Many stakeholders have called on your government to repeal Bill C-2 for over a year now, and this is not purely of academic concern. In the last year alone, over 2,000 Canadians, as you pointed out, died from drug overdoses, mostly from opioids—as people have died from thalidomide.

Now, in the last week of Parliament of 2016, you've introduced legislation to streamline Bill C-2, and I congratulate the government on doing that. Of course, since it is the last week before Parliament adjourns for Christmas, this bill will not be dealt with until February of 2017 and not passed until spring of 2017 at the earliest. That's months from now.

The Minister of Health for British Columbia last night said that the opioid crisis in B.C. is “like a war” and that they can't wait for this legislation to be passed. I think Dr. Perry Kendall, the public health officer in British Columbia, said the same thing—that they're not waiting—and you've pointed out, I think with some power, the impact in my home province of British Columbia of these opioid deaths: almost 700 British Columbians will die this year.

Pop-up clinics are operating right now in British Columbia to provide emergency services, and they're either illegal or operating in a legal grey zone.

As you know, this committee conducted an emergency study into the opioid crisis, and the very first recommendation that this committee made to your government, with all-party support, was to declare this a national public health emergency, as the thalidomide issue was. The reason for this is that it would give the public health officer of Canada extraordinary powers to act immediately while your legislation works through the House over the next three or four or five months, including opening emergency clinics now for safe consumption, for naloxone administration, or for drug testing—whatever these emergency clinics could be used for right now to save lives.

My first question to you, Minister, is why don't you declare a national public health emergency to give the public health officer of Canada these extraordinary powers in the next 90 days so that we can start saving lives now, while your legislation takes time to work through the process?

Good Samaritan Drug Overdose Act

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Madam Speaker, it is my honour to rise to speak to the motion. Let me first thank the member for Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam for bringing this motion to the floor and raising the issue in the House of Commons.

At some point in time, all members in the House have been touched by this incredible issue of addiction, substance misuse in our own communities. Perhaps we have come to know people who have lost their lives. The thing about substance misuse and drug addiction is that it is entirely preventable.

In fact, on the question of overdose, there is overwhelming evidence to illustrate the fact that we need to look at substance misuse as a medical health issue and not a criminal justice issue. That is how we can save lives.

To the point of this motion, this is exactly what the member is trying to do, to take away the criminal element so we can save lives.

Imagine for one minute what life would be like if one of our children, a son or daughter, who might be young, is experimenting, takes drugs, and at that moment in time a life is lost. Imagine what that would be like. I cannot imagine. I am a mother of two young kids, aged 13 and 8. I dread the teenage years to come, the idea of kids experimenting, some horrible, unimaginable thing happening, and lives being lost.

I see this in my own community in Vancouver East. So many people's lives have been lost. There is a saying that dead people do not detox and that is why we need harm reduction. That is why we need to move forward in addressing this from a medical health perspective.

The member's bill is one piece in the harm reduction spectrum on which we need to move forward. We need to tell people that they do not need to worry about a criminal charges being laid against them. In this instance, it would be limited to only simple possession but, nonetheless, it is equally important to send that message.

Additional work needs to be done. There is no question about it. My colleague, the health critic, the member for Vancouver Kingsway, attempted to move in that direction at committee. He moved an amendment to call for expanding the scope of the bill to allow for additional measures. For example, people in my community say that it is not so much that they worry about a charge of simple possession, they worry about outstanding warrants. They worry about violating their parole, for example, and that there would be implications for them. Young people gather at these things called raves. They party and bad things happen. There is no definition of “at the scene”, the scope of that, and whether it would apply to a group of people in that context.

If we want to move in this direction, more work needs to be done and we need to keep pushing to ensure that the issue around substance misuse is looked at from a health perspective. Addiction is a health issue. I know the former Conservative government thought it was a criminal justice issue alone.

I was relieved to hear the conviction of the member who spoke before me to save lives. Let us look at this issue from that perspective. I would assume that if we believe in that and on the evidence that has been presented, we would all agree that the time has come for the government to also repeal C-2, because that prevents saving lives.

The medical health officer in my community in Vancouver, British Columbia, has said on the public record that Bill C-2 impedes progress in moving forward with respect to harm reduction in terms of bringing supervised injection facilities into communities. The litany of onerous requirements prevent medical health officers to move forward on bringing supervised injection facilities into communities.

As it stands right now, there is only one application before the government, and that is from Montreal. My community has tried to move forward with others and has been unable to get it on the table because of the onerous requirements.

The medical health officer from Vancouver, Patricia Daly, has said on the public record that Vancouver is struggling to try to move forward on this because of the onerous requirements on Bill C-2. We need to get rid of this bill. Let us get real about saving lives. This measure is an important one. I absolutely support it, but we cannot stop there. There is so much more that we can do. The fact is that we do have a crisis, a national crisis, on our hands with the opioid overdose situation.

The desperation in my own community is such that there are pop-up tents. In fact, there is one pop-up tent that has emerged in our community. Volunteers have come forward to provide for some measure of safety for drug users. They say that they would not want to continue this operation because it is not a sanctioned site. There are no health practitioners at the site, but they are doing this. Why? Because they have seen their loved ones die. They actually provide naloxone to the tune of up to 24 cases where they have utilized that to save lives on the ground. Each day when the site is up and running, up to 100 people inject at that site.

This should not be how we continue. It should not be the case. We need to bring forward science-based and proven strategies to address this. A safe site, Insite, is one of those measures. We need to ensure there is progress here, and take away measures that hamper progress in that regard. Bill C-2 is one of them.

I once again thank the member for bringing this forward. I support the bill. I applaud his efforts. More work needs to be done, and I look forward to working with all members of the House and moving forward with this goal in mind: we need to bring in measures to save lives.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for seconding the bill at first reading.

I agree that Bill C-2 from the previous Parliament created a problem, an almost impenetrable labyrinth for people to traverse in trying to establish supervised consumption sites. We need to take a hard look at it and should look proactively at streamlining the process to make it more effective, because we need many more supervised consumption sites in this country.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for the motion and the good work he has done in bringing this forward.

I absolutely agreed with his comments at second reading about the need to go further, that this is just a first step. With respect to that and related to the drug overdose crisis, as members know, Bill C-2 is impeding efforts by medical health professionals to move forward in addressing the opioid crisis.

B.C.'s own medical health officer, Perry Kendall, has said that we need to get rid of Bill C-2. Does the member agree with our medical health officer about Bill C-2?

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you again to the witnesses.

I want to go back to the crisis we're faced with today. I know that the Vancouver medical health officer, Patricia Daly, has publicly stated that their application for an additional supervised injection facility has been hampered by delays as a result of Bill C-2. The onerous requirements in trying to move forward in upcoming facilities to save lives has been severely hampered. She has articulated that on the public record. I know that the health authority in Vancouver is attempting in the interim to get five additional supervised injection facilities up and operating in the midst of this crisis.

Dr. Evan Wood, do you know anything about that process and whether or not additional sites would be effective in saving lives?

[Dr. Evan Wood]

In terms of your first question, Onsite is located in the Downtown Eastside, so you're exactly right: it's a place where people in crisis, whose lives really are a living hell, see the opportunity for something else. They get a bed, but then what next? Obviously we want to get people out of the Downtown Eastside. Investments in recovery-oriented systems of care have not been there. Unless you have $20,000 to go into an expensive treatment program, the door just isn't there. Wait lists are long. It makes absolutely no sense.

I'm not a lawyer, and I don't want things to get politicized in terms of Bill C-2. I just think there's been a lot of misinformation. I've seen how, when these things become oppositional, people get entrenched in their thinking. They put their blinders on. They don't understand that by focusing on preventing public health interventions, it doesn't achieve the objective of another thing coming forward. I just haven't seen that. I strongly encourage everybody to try to get beyond historical partisan issues around this crisis and to focus on what's best. Clearly that will be an evidence-based approach.

It was alluded earlier that it will cost a lot of money. I would just reiterate the point that we're spending that money. We're spending it on emergency rooms, on HIV and hepatitis C wards, and on programs for people who've had hypoxic brain injuries. There's also a cost to productivity, and of course the cost to families who have lost a loved one. The money is being spent on downstream consequences.

If we can reduce those costs through public health programs that are proven effective, of course I support that, but we need a more comprehensive approach in addition to that, one that involves an effective treatment system. Training health care providers and establishing guidelines and best practices: it's a clear way to identify where those investments should be and then move forward.

[Darshan Singh Kang, Liberal, Calgary Skyview, AB]

We've been talking about Bill C-2. I think the Minister of Health is going to look at the barriers in Bill C-2.

Dr. Juurlink, you said something about doctors prescribing medications. I know some people will go from doctor to doctor to get OxyContin, for example. They will get it, and sell it too.

How can we control the medications? Is there some kind of mechanism in place, so the doctor knows that—

[Dr. Bonnie Henry]

I could talk for a long time on that. Some of them are outlined in the written report that we sent in.

There are about 25 different pieces of Bill C-2 that I find are barriers. One of the key ones is requirement for opinions from neighbourhoods that are not necessarily based on fact, and the types of opinions that need to come in. It's a challenge to get those, because it reopens questioning around supervised consumption services and their worth. It's a challenging part.

The other part that is just ridiculous is that you have to name every single person who will work in the facility, and none of them can have a criminal record. People like Sean would be excluded from working in a site, which we think is ridiculous, because peer support is really important and it helps.

There are a whole variety of them that I can certainly list for you.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Let me pick up on that, both Ms. Henry and Ms. Lapointe.

I'm going to speak bluntly here. There seems to be a division in this room and with this government on Bill C-2. The government seems to stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that it needs to make any changes to Bill C-2 .

Ms. Henry, the words you used were that Bill C-2 contains extreme barriers. Hon. Hedy Fry, when she was the Liberal Health critic, said that Bill C-2 was designed to avoid the opening of safe consumption sites. I think Dr. Perry Kendall has said that too.

I'm going to ask you directly. The Liberal government seems to suggest that the problem isn't with Bill C-2. It's just explaining the requirements to groups, and if we can facilitate that, we can get more safe injection sites.

The facts are that we have two injection sites in the country, InSite and the Dr. Peter Centre. There is not a single site that has opened in this country in the last year and a half. We have one application currently, and that's from the City of Montreal. With the Toronto Board of Health, everybody is telling me that with the barriers, it takes months and hundreds of hours to get an application in.

My question is, what are the barriers in Bill C-2 that you think are unnecessary?

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

David, I also appreciated your comment that you've seen some federal leadership coming on this.

The Minister of Health has laid out a comprehensive five-point federal strategy, including better informing Canadians about the risks of opioids, supporting better prescription practices, reducing the access to unnecessary opioids, supporting better treatment options, and improving the gathering of evidence and getting the evidence together. The naloxone capability was made possible, and the nasal sprays are now coming in from the U.S.

I heard a number of recommendations from you and from Bonnie.

From Bonnie I heard about expanding supervised consumption services, and that Bill C-2 is a major problem across Canada; establishing drug checking as a harm reduction service to make sure you can see what you're ingesting, even if it's illegal; and increasing availability of treatments for opioid use disorders.

From David I heard about prescription changes and better education of physicians to make sure that the use of opioids is better managed.

All of you referenced better surveillance, and that we need a national surveillance program for this.

I heard from John that the dosage of naloxone needs to be increased in some of these kits.

Are there any other recommendations beyond these? The minister is convening a workshop in November as a special consultation. Is there any other advice you can give us to better the situation or to give advice to the minister?

[Sean LeBlanc, Founder and Chairperson, Drug Users Advocacy League]

First of all, thank you very much for inviting me.

I'd like to mention that I'm also a peer support worker in the city of Ottawa. I work pretty well first-hand and front-line with drug users, almost specifically opiate users, on a daily basis.

DUAL is a non-profit that was founded in 2010. It neither condones nor condemns drug use, but sees it as a facet of everyday society. People are going to use drugs, and we just try to best educate them about that. We have several services, some of which Catherine runs, with a couple of drop-ins. It's basically to provide a voice for people who do not have one.

I am someone who has survived an addiction to opiates. I used opiates for about 15 years. It's not a pleasant thing; it certainly isn't. Coming off of these drugs is extremely, extremely hard. I had pretty well a normal childhood and everything. The last thing I thought I would ever be was someone who would inject opiates. Unfortunately, I suffered through a few traumas during my teenage years, and I just wanted to end the pain.

That's one thing that I will give credit to opiates for: they help you to numb the pain, not in any healthy or helpful way, but for someone who's really hurting, opiates do deaden that pain.

My life pretty well spiralled after that. I ended up homeless, with not much self-worth. I guess I have kind of a stubborn streak, and thankfully, around 2010 I started to do some advocacy, and founded DUAL out of that. It was basically the lack of inclusion that really made me want to start DUAL to create a voice for people. I started being on different committees and everything like that. I'd always see some great doctors and police officers and epidemiologists, but there were never people who actually used drugs on those committees. If they were there, it was usually in a really tokenistic way.

This is why I'm so thankful to be invited here today. These offers don't usually come around. I think the best way we can get results in this crisis is by working in conjunction with each other—doctors, coroners, police officers, and, more so than anybody, people who use drugs, because they really are the experts on this.

The Oxy crisis started right around 2010 in Ontario. As my fellow panellists have alluded, it created this whole desire, this need, for fentanyl and heroin. The drugs have gotten so much stronger, and so many younger people are using them now, it's really, really scary.

I think we don't want to get too far into that, though. These drugs do play a really good role in the lives of some people, those who are really suffering from great pain. I've known people who cannot get relief from that pain through an opiate prescription because of the stigma associated with using these drugs. Again, I'm not condoning them or anything, but they do fill a role in our society. Some people need them, and I don't think we want to get too far away from that.

I'll just speak very briefly and very informally, because my fellow panellists have said everything I wanted to say on this. I alluded earlier a little bit to detoxing off the opiates. When I first started to want to get off opiates, there weren't really any substitutes out there for me. There was methadone, but there was no treatment offered. I tried to get into a treatment centre, and that was impossible. To this day it's pretty well a roll of the dice if you can get into treatment or not. We really need to increase all different types of treatment. Right now there's basically one form, and that's detox. That's it. It's not going to work for everybody. Nobody ever wants to grow up to stick a needle in their arm or use opiates, but it's a facet of society and I think we need to deal with it responsibly.

This is a medical issue, as some of my fellow panellists have pointed out, and not a criminal issue. I think we need to continue to deal with it in that way. Almost all my recommendations have already been said by my fellow panellists, but I think we really need to repeal Bill C-2, or at least different parts of it, and have supervised injection sites. The Supreme Court came out unanimously in favour of keeping InSite open in Vancouver, yet we've seen no other supervised injection sites in this country. Frankly, there should be one, if not several, in every major city. They've been shown to reduce overdoses, reduce deaths, and reduce the transmission of diseases.

Another thing that DUAL does is to go into schools a lot, but we're very limited in what we can say, especially in public schools. There's no harm reduction education; it's all abstinence based. And a lot of people who are starting into drugs, specifically opioids, are doing so at that age. Those teenage years are extremely important and we're not allowed to have an honest conversation with them.

I think there can be some really good benefits to getting to people while they're young and showing them that in addiction, addiction to opioids specifically, nothing positive is going to come of that.

I think we need to be educating people who are being released from jail. Right now there are a lot of overdoses among people being released. They'll get out, they'll use, and take the same dose they used before they went in and it is enough to kill them. I'm sorry I'm so emotional, but these are my friends, the people I work with, people I love. I lost my best friend to a fentanyl overdose and it really hits home. In Ottawa we see an overdose on opioids about every 10 days, and that's obviously just not acceptable.

I brought a naloxone kit here today, which has been really great. I've actually used it twice and I've seen it, basically, pull people right out of an overdose. The problem with these kits right now is that the dose of the naloxone is so low and the drugs doses are so high it isn't actually counteracting the overdoses as well as it should. I'd really like to see the dosage of naloxone, a very innocuous and harmless drug, increased so that it can meet the demand that these drugs are putting out.

I'd also like to see and develop other forms of treatment. Right now, even to get somebody into detox is difficult. I've got people approaching me every day wanting to clean up their lives per se and we can't get a bed anywhere. It's basically just the luck of the draw. If you can get somebody in, great, if you can't, then that's a....

What's most important is that we need to continue to include people with lived experience and people who use drugs in these conversations. We have a wealth of knowledge that I think we could share. As I alluded to earlier, in conjunction with scientists, doctors, and politicians, as well, obviously, we can really get to the guts of this problem. There are solutions out there. I believe that Canadians are really nurturing. We really believe in health care. This is a medical issue and I think we need to continue to treat it as such.

A statement that we use at DUAL and other drug-user groups around the country is “nothing for us, without us”. We'd just like to see more inclusion at all levels from the top to the bottom, because there are solutions to these problems. We solved a lot of things with the Oxy crisis and I think we really can do that with the fentanyl crisis. Let's just keep plugging away and I think these problems can be eradicated really quickly.

Again, I apologize for my emotion. My voice was breaking most of the time and I really appreciate the invite here. Thank you very much.

Health

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the reaction of the government has been far too slow. Hundreds of Canadians have died while the government simply plans a meeting in November.

If the government truly believes in evidence-based decision-making, why is it ignoring the advice of health experts who say the evidence is overwhelming that safe consumption sites save lives and should be used to help address Canada's overdose epidemic?

The latest call comes from B.C.'s chief medical officer, Dr. Perry Kendall, who recently implored the federal Liberal government to cut the Conservative red tape imposed by Bill C-2. Indeed, Canada's municipalities, including Kelowna, Kamloops, Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa are publicly expressing their desire to set up new safe consumption sites. However, in two years, there has not been a single new safe consumption site opened up in this country. That is because of the legislation passed by the previous government, which remains untouched by the current government. Meanwhile, two people continue to die every day in B.C. from drug overdoses.

When will the government stop applying Stephen Harper's regressive legislation and repeal Bill C-2 to start saving lives?

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

We'll split our time.

Maybe you can see that the Liberals are really trying to focus on this one thing, safe injection sites, as far as the spectrum of treatment is concerned. That's what I wanted to ask a question on, because Ms. Geller was quite correct when she said there's no evidence of increased crime rates at these safe injection sites.

I'd like to ask the RCMP if you could get back to us with statistics. I don't think you'll have them. My understanding is that where Insite is in Vancouver, it's actually been suggested to the police that they don't charge. In other words, if they're not charging for all the crimes that they see, the crime rates will not go up.

I actually had the opportunity to go down there unannounced, and it is amazing how many ongoing crimes you're seeing, but they just don't charge people.

I was wondering if you could get some of those statistics back to us, because they say one of the reasons for putting these safe injection sites into communities is it won't increase the crime rate. But we do know that addicts usually are not people of means. My understanding is that to get their hit for the day, they have to commit between four and eight crimes. If this is petty crime, prostitution, break and enter, or whatever they need to do, wherever you locate that safe injection site, within the area around it, it will cause an increase in crime, and the police officers we had a chance to talk to down there said there were all kinds of petty crime down there.

I think it's really important when you're looking at Bill C-2, that you see that public safety in the communities, the neighbourhoods, with the moms and dads, the kids in the area is balanced with just the desire to put these through.

Is that information you could get back to us with?