I've made it very clear at many events and committee appearances that the opioid crisis is a file that we have certainly been doing a lot of work on, and one that keeps me up at night.
I indicated in my opening statements that my first tour was in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, where I had an opportunity to meet with many front-line service providers and people with lived experience who shared with me differing points of views.
With respect to decriminalization, and to your question specifically, we recognize that decriminalization alone would not ensure quality control of drugs on the street. It certainly is not going to prevent all of the deaths that are happening.
We also recognize that Portugal's model is very different from the Canadian model. We recognize that in Canada the provinces and territories are the ones that provide direct services to clients. With respect to the federal government, we are not the ones that provide the direct service delivery. As a result, our government has taken a comprehensive, compassionate, and collaborative approach, working with the provinces and territories. Also, we are using all of the tools at our disposal to ensure that we can provide compassionate care to services.
As you are well aware, we have made several regulatory changes to ensure that medication replacement therapies are available for individuals. This year alone we have made methadone and diacetylmorphine available without doctors having to apply for class exemptions.
We are certainly moving forward in ensuring that we can use all the levers we have at our disposal to effectively deal with this.
The other thing, as well—