—money that will fund 20 brand-new treatment beds for female sex workers and will allow a team of doctors, nurses, and therapists to go out onto the streets to find and help the hardest-to-serve individuals.
Today, colleagues, I am very pleased to announce that in addition to the $10 million for Vancouver, our government will provide $2 million extra, dedicated to aboriginal-specific addiction services within the downtown eastside. We are consulting with local NGOs right now to best determine how to use that money.
As Federal Health Minister I am trying to lead by example in this area, because I believe it is the right thing to do; we need to close the gap in treatment options that exist for the rich and poor in Canada.
Wealthy people who become addicted to drugs can check into expensive rehab centres for months at a time, if that is what is required to help them. But for the poorest of Canadians, who live in conditions of extreme poverty, enslaved by an addiction for which full recovery is possible, we have been offering supervised injection, needle exchanges, and crack pipes. We have been offering drug maintenance rather than drug treatment. We have been sending the message: “We have given up on you; we do not expect you to recover.”
Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan, just a few weeks ago in an editorial in The Globe and Mail, called the SIS “palliative care”. This echoed the report of a committee struck by the British Columbia Medical Association in 1997, which called harm reduction “the palliative care of addictions medicine”.
Palliative care is what you give someone when there is no more hope. It is end-stage treatment when every other solution has failed, and we just wait for people to die. But injection drug users do not necessarily have to die; there is still hope for them. Even if they fail treatment the first time, we can help them to get up and try again. In purely medical terms, it is unethical to offer palliative care when treatment could help.
There is a notorious lack of treatment beds in the downtown eastside—