Mr. Speaker, the last time this bill was brought up for debate was in January, and I did not get a chance to speak to it then. Since the government has waited six months to bring it back as an important issue it would like to have discussed, I am happy I have the opportunity to speak to it.
I also have a question for the government. What is the hurry? The last time the government wanted to talk about Bill C-2 was January 30, when it called it up for debate. Today, on June 17, there seems to be a huge hurry, because the government needs to stop debate again. It needs to curtail the debate that happens in this House, again. The government wants to make sure that it limits the debate in this House by moving yet another time allocation motion.
I just do not understand. If this is so important for the government, why did it not bring it up sooner? Why did the government wait six months? Now it is so important that it needs to stop debate and push it through the House. That just goes to show, once again, the lack of respect for Parliament.
I will come back to Bill C-2 now. This is a deeply flawed bill based on an anti-drug ideology and false fears for public safety. The government continues to talk about public safety concerns and how Bill C-2 would actually protect our communities and make them safer. In reality, that is not the truth. It really should be a health bill, not a public safety bill. Looking at the details and the actionable items that would come out of the bill, it should actually be a health-related bill.
This is yet another attempt by the Conservative government to rally its base. We witnessed its “Keep heroin out of our backyards” fundraising it did on its website just moments after the bill was introduced in the House. It just goes to show that the Conservatives are trying to continue fearmongering and rallying their base, raising money from their ideological standpoint.
The NDP feels that sound public policy should not be based on ideology but on facts and evidence. That is what we are pushing for.
I would like to talk a little about the background of Bill C-2, if I may, because my constituents who are listening at home may not know what Bill C-2 is all about or what safe injections sites are.
Canada only has one safe injection site in the country, and it is located in Vancouver. Since the opening of InSite in 2003, I believe, Vancouver has actually seen a 35% decrease in overdose deaths and has also had a decrease in crime, communicable disease infection rates, and relapse rates for drug users in the community around the safe injection site called InSite.
This bill is about the section 56 exemption InSite receives and that other drug injection sites would receive. InSite was originally granted the exemption in 2003 to operate under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act for medical and scientific purposes to provide services and to do research on the effectiveness of supervised injection facilities.
Section 56 is the section of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act that grants the minister the authority to approve operations using drugs for medical, scientific, or law enforcement purposes.
In 2008, the section 56 exemption granted by the minister had expired, and the minister of health at that time denied InSite's renewal of the section 56 exemption, which of course triggered a series of court cases in which the B.C. Supreme Court ruled that InSite should be granted the exemption. We then had the Federal Court appeal to the B.C. Court of Appeal, which also ruled that InSite should stay open.
I do not want to talk too much more about the background, but I want to make sure that people at home in Scarborough know what I am talking about.
The Supreme Court ruling said that InSite and other supervised injection sites must be granted the section 56 exemption where they decrease the risk of death and disease and where there is little or no evidence that they would have a negative impact on public safety. Even the Supreme Court decision showed that there was no decrease in public safety but rather that it could help the community. The Supreme Court decision in 2011 refused the government's argument. The Conservatives had tried for four years to force the closure of InSite.
I mentioned some of the statistics, but I have more. For example, between 1987 and 1993, the rates of overdose deaths in Vancouver had increased from 16 deaths per annum to 200 deaths per annum. That is from evidence provided to the Supreme Court. However, the rate of overdose deaths in east Vancouver had dropped 35% since InSite had opened. That is just from the one site. This information was from Marshall, Milloy, Wood, Montaner, and Kerr and published in The Lancet in 2011.
Over a one-year period, 2,171 referrals were made for InSite users. They did not just use the services of the safe injection site under the supervision of health care professionals but actually took it one step further. More than 2,000 people sought addiction counselling or were able to receive other types of support services.
There was a significant improvement in the lives of the people who live in the Vancouver area near InSite and a significant improvement in the safety of the community, because there was also a significant drop in the number of discarded syringes, injection-related litter, and people injecting on the streets one year after InSite opened.
Injection drug users who use InSite are 70% less likely to share needles. This statistic came from Kerr et al, who I mentioned earlier, in 2005. The internationally known best practice to reduce the rate of HIV-AIDS is to reduce the sharing of needles. This has been proven to be what is happening in the Vancouver area around InSite.
Going back to the Supreme Court decision, it refused the arguments made by the government. The Supreme Court said that if it supported the closure of InSite, it would actually be violating the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, because it would prohibit Canadians from having access to health care services that were making them healthier. To stop the provision of these services would increase the danger to their lives.
We are supposed to be prudent law-makers. We have a fiduciary responsibility to the constituents we represent and to all Canadians to make sure that we are doing the due diligence needed to put forth laws that make our country better and make communities safer and healthier. The bill before us would not do that. The Supreme Court's ruling was quite clear in making that argument.
The Conservative government likes to talk about Nimbyism, “not in my backyard”, or “we do not want heroine in our backyards, do we?”
