Indeed, it was quite clear. The then government cannot be accused of lying to the public. Its election platform included cracking down on crime and strengthening the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to impose mandatory minimums for drug-related crime.
I remember very clearly the 2011 case involving Insite in Vancouver, which went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, here in Ottawa. I was one of the lawyers for an international coalition appearing before the Supreme Court. The government refused to renew the exemption for the Insite supervised injection site, which was the only supervised injection site back then. Today, there are 30 such sites.
Such policies exacerbated the crisis by removing harm reduction from the Canadian Drugs and Substances Strategy. That is a major flaw and the main reason why the situation worsened. By focusing first and foremost on enforcement, the government increased prison sentences and filled prisons. Legislation resulting from Bill C-5, which was passed in November 2022, confirms the overrepresentation of indigenous and racialized individuals in our correctional facilities. This is due to the fact that people have been locked up, put in prison and sentenced for minor offences that, for the most part, have had no impact on public safety.
This is an archaic attitude, and it's a misinterpretation of international conventions. When you have the World Health Organization, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime telling us that we need to move toward decriminalization, adopt a public health approach and respect human rights, it's quite clear. That's the current direction.
It's clear that, by tightening the rules around the strict enforcement of the law between 2005 and 2015, we missed the mark. Should we go back to that? Please, don't go there.