I think I'm going to answer in English this time.
First of all, I'm also deeply saddened by any drug deaths, because of the many factors involved. I ask the chair and the members of the committee that we stop politicizing this debate. I said in my testimony that we need a fact-based debate.
Policies have not changed that much. There have been no major policy changes in the last nine years. We're still under criminalization and prohibition, and we're still stigmatizing people, which prevents them from accessing treatment. We're not flooding the streets with drugs; prohibition is flooding the streets with drugs. Of course, there may be diversions, but that's only a tiny part of the major problems we're facing from decades of prohibition that brought this toxic supply. That's the fact. Experts agree on that.
If we don't change our way of thinking, we're just going to continue this crisis and these deaths. People are dying. When I hear that we should adopt a recovery model, I'm sorry, but we've already been in a recovery model for decades. That's where the money is—way more than in prevention or harm reduction. There has been a tiny change in the last years, which was deeply needed, to add other tools to a continuum—a spectrum of services to answer different needs and walks of life.
The Alberta model.... This is a false dilemma. It's a sophism, and it's not prevention or harm reduction or treatment. We need all those things. We need everything. Any serious person I know who will defend harm reduction will also be in agreement with recovery. In fact, in his testimony, Dr. de Villa told you that harm reduction accelerates access to treatment, to recovery, because it's a first contact for people. Even with the Alberta recovery model, I'm sorry, but we just learned that they're under-declaring deaths, so that model is not one to follow.
We need to have more recovery, of course, but we need to change our way to address this problem. That's what I think about it.