Yes.
Fundamentally, the addiction crisis that we're in...and it is an addiction crisis. I need to point that out. Nobody walks down to the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver or Whyte Avenue in Edmonton, or wanders the streets in our beautiful city capital, as I have, and thinks that these individuals who are struggling and are intermittently homeless are not in active addiction.
Speedballing methamphetamine with fentanyl in this crisis situation is an addiction. We need to address that seriously, and if we're not adult enough to have that conversation, we're not going to find the right policies and solutions to it.
When it comes to safe supply, what that does is fundamentally increase the supply of opioids available to the public. If you look at the Stanford-Lancet commission from the world's pre-eminent scientific journal published with Stanford University, which is academically the authority on the North America opioid overdose crisis, the axiomatic rule that comes out of that report is effectively that if you increase supply, you increase harms. It does not matter if the producer of the supply is a drug dealer trafficking fentanyl from China or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau providing it through SUAP grants. The same biological fact of consuming the opioid will drive new addiction. You will have more supply. You will reduce costs. You will reduce barriers. You will increase access and, therefore, increase harm.
We saw this because the fundamental crisis we're facing was due to an opioid crisis that was proliferated in the 1990s with Purdue Pharmaceuticals and oxycodone, cynically propagated by them and by the industry that moved it forward.
We now see the Government of Canada repeating this again, and if they deny the diversion claims that Alberta believes are true, if they deny the diversion claims that the RCMP and Prince George and others have said are happening en masse with mass seizures of 10,000-plus pills, they can use evidence of a chemical tracker, which is approved as per guidelines with the FDA in the United States to protect intellectual property for for-profit pharmaceuticals.
Surely we can do that here in Canada. Surely if we have the ability to protect profits in the United States for pharmaceutical companies, why not protect lives and use the evidence that it is being diverted. Otherwise, I don't understand what they're afraid of beyond the moral and legal liability that they have for propagating it.