Thank you.
Just drawing on that, then, it's kind of clear to me. The Supreme Court laid out five criteria. If the intent of this amendment is that those five criteria for exemption be bypassed by the fact that a minister in a province has declared a state of emergency, I'm not sure that meets that problem of balancing public health and public safety. We can't just bypass that balancing act that the Minister of Health federally has to maintain, and there's nothing prohibiting a minister of health at a provincial or territorial level from submitting an application with those five. If they reached a point where they had declared a state of emergency, then they could be facilitating those applications. They would know who the people are. They would have the entire provincial or territorial resources at hand to put together the application on an expedited basis.
I have a problem with this amendment, because it moves away from the five Supreme Court criteria. It moves away from the balancing of public health and public safety concerns, and it almost relieves the minister of her obligations in the case of a provincial emergency being declared. I have a concern from that perspective.
There are people who need these services today. We need to get these sites up and running immediately. We heard compelling testimony from witnesses when we did our own study that this is an incredible risk, and people are in incredible jeopardy from the opioid crisis that's out there. I do think we need to move forward, but a piece of legislation shouldn't be written to deal just with the crisis of the moment; it has to be reflective of a longer-term solution.
I understand the urgency that Mr. Davies is attempting to address, the sense that maybe something could be put in place faster. I don't know anything about their legality, but we're already hearing that there are workarounds that the provinces are tolerating right now to make sure that there are appropriate safe treatment sites created while they wait for this legislation to come.
Again I'm going to come back to this. The minister can't waive that important balance between public health and public safety and can't just defer to a request from a provincial or territorial counterpart to waive them, and I do believe that provinces and territories have the rights to do this work to get the applications in. They have enormous resources, so there's no reason they can't comply with the act as written.