Thank you to all the witnesses for being here today and for their riveting and, I think, quite sobering testimony.
Dr. Fairbairn, I will start with you. It's been said quite often in the last little while that there isn't one pandemic in Canada; there are two. We, of course, have the COVID pandemic, but we have an entrenched opioid overdose crisis that has taken over 15,000 lives in the last four years alone in this country. Not to equate them, but that is more lives lost to overdoses than we've currently lost from COVID.
On October 28, Dr. Fairbairn, you co-authored an op-ed in the Canadian Medical Association Journal that said the following:
Swift and decisive action has been crucial to Canada's success limiting COVID-19. The same emphatic response is needed now [to] combat the overdose crisis.
Could you please outline what an emphatic response to the overdose crisis would look like in Canada?