Health Committee on Nov. 5th, 2024

[Shaun Wright]

It definitely lessens the deterrence of a sentence if that's how it rolls out. In particular, electronic monitoring, with the expansion of it here recently over the last several years, has been problematic, as even on electronic monitoring, many individuals continue to commit offences in the community, including very serious violent offences.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you.

Ms. Sidhu, you have five minutes.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being with us.

Ms. Aalhus, I know that you're working hard in the Yukon. My colleague is always talking about you and the work you are doing there helping the community. Thank you.

You talked about the compassionate approach. You also said that sometimes people are afraid to call the RCMP or an ambulance in the event of an overdose. Can you elaborate on why they're scared and on compassionate support and why they need that?

[Jill Aalhus]

The Good Samaritan Drug Overdose Act was meant to protect bystanders, but loopholes allow criminal charges for probation violations, no-contact orders and low-level trafficking.

In our small communities, people die surrounded by others who fear the consequences of calling for help. This needs to change. We need to follow up on epidemiologist Dr. Jane Buxton's recommendation to this committee in 2016 and review the RCMP's approach to 911 calls for overdoses. We also need to decriminalize and address stigma so that people can feel safe accessing support. We need that support to be compassionate. We need it to be available when people are looking for support. We also really need to centre those we're trying to support in these conversations.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

We have heard a few times about the importance of safe and affordable housing for vulnerable people dealing with substance use. Could you tell us about how your housing programs help to meet that need?

[Jill Aalhus]

We operate low-barrier housing programs. What we are able to do currently without funding is provide a tiny house community for people who are at various points on the substance use spectrum so they have a safe and affordable place to live.

I think adding five units has been an inadequate solution to the housing crisis in the Yukon. As we've been working on this issue, we've seen it worsen. Often we have people tenting into the fall, in very cold seasons. They're being moved by bylaw and RCMP, so it's hard to reach those people when we're trying to do outreach and provide support.

I think addressing housing and providing safe, low-barrier, supportive housing is the solution.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Rolfe, you spoke earlier about what sounds like a particularly promising housing program in St. Thomas, Ontario. You also mentioned that when support services were introduced, overdoses in the community declined to zero.

Is there any more data on this program that you can share with this committee?

[Steven Rolfe]

I don't have current data. I do know that a Western University study is starting on that program and that's an evaluation piece, so it will be forthcoming.

One bit of information I can share is some of the conversations we had with St. Thomas police when the program was implemented. Police involvement, special constable involvement, with the residents of this particular program was important to folks settling in. It helped them achieve what they wanted to achieve with their goals.

We also noticed that police calls in the community in the downtown core of St. Thomas were reduced, and that corresponded to when these individuals accessed housing. It speaks to what you see when you respond to community need with compassion and create physical spaces for people to live in securely, spaces where relationships can be fostered and people can access care. That is a preferable approach, and our police colleagues certainly agreed with that.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Can you tell us more about the role of tenant-led development in mitigating harm and healing communities?

[Steven Rolfe]

We firmly believe that tenant-led responses are much more preferable to imposed responses. They're about engaging tenants and setting goals around what kind of a community they want. These are single-site, supportive housing communities with multiresidential buildings, so when tenants gather, they talk about the agreed-upon approach when they have guests and what kind of community they want.

Largely, people come up with ideas. There are certain things that aren't talked about or aren't done in communal areas. What people do in their own apartment is a matter of discussion, but on the whole, it's also about how to respond to people knocking on their doors at two o'clock in the morning. How do they want to respond to people who are ringing all of the buttons at the front door? What's the agreed-upon response that they want? That's critical, because most people will say that it's easier to sleep at night when somebody is not knocking on their door at two o'clock in the morning trying to tell them things.

I hope that was helpful.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Mr. Rolfe.

Next we have Mr. Doherty, please, for five minutes.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Mr. Wright, I want to again thank you for your service. I almost want to say that you deserve a medal for being here today and listening to some of the comments that are going on.

I want to go with the same line of questioning as my colleague Mr. Moore. This has to do with—and I'm going to be very blunt about it—the hug-a-thug policies we have seen under the Liberal government.

November 25, 2021, is a date that you're very familiar with, Mr. Wright. It's when Paul Nicholas Russell terrorized the community of Vanderhoof and hunted RCMP officers. He shot dozens of high-velocity rounds into an RCMP detachment, narrowly missing both enlisted and civilian members before taking to the streets. Last week, his sentence was reduced from 10 years to five years. That's one example.

Three weeks ago, my constituent Bob Hubbard returned to his house on Upper Mud River Road when it was being looted by a group of drug addicts—criminals. He tried to stop them. He was run over, severely injured and airlifted to a hospital in Vancouver, where he remains today. He almost lost his arm. Facial reconstructive surgery had to be done. He had numerous injuries. He'll have to have numerous surgeries as he moves forward. Mr. Hubbard is a senior.

Mr. Wright, this revolving door that you and your frontline officers have to face each and every day must be demoralizing. This is an opportunity. You are here representing thousands of frontline officers. I would like to hear in your own words how demoralizing these types of policies are. We see it with drugs, and we're hearing it today. It's not all whistles and glow sticks that we hear from our colleagues. You and your officers deal with life and death decisions each and every day. You don't want to see anybody die from an overdose. Your testimony today has been very valuable, but I feel that it's been under attack.

The remaining time is for you to share how these hug-a-thug policies have demoralized your frontline staff.

[Shaun Wright]

Yes, that's a very good description. It is demoralizing. I would say that for some of the fresh, young recruits, it's actually soul-crushing to see. It's not hyperbole that quite often these individuals are released back out into the community, even after violent crimes, prior to the paperwork being completed by the officer.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

I should add that the criminals who were found in the case of Mr. Hubbard were released back onto the streets within 24 hours.

[Shaun Wright]

That's very typical nowadays. It's different from my experience of a couple of decades ago. With a serious offence like that, those individuals would probably have been held in custody for some time, if not until their trial. It is commonplace now for individuals to be released back into the community.

I know there's a lot of reasoning behind that given how being in custody may impact the individual, but I think there's a wider argument about the harms that society as a whole faces when some of those individuals—particularly career violent criminals who for decades have committed severe violent acts—are released into the community again. The next victim will suffer potentially life-altering injuries trying to protect their property or when they're minding their own business.

It's extremely disheartening. Definitely, over my almost 30-year career, it's the most disheartening thing I've seen—and not because I want to see people locked up. It's because I want to see society protected from people who actively want to do harm and ill against other individuals. From my personal perspective, it seems like a lot of the tools and processes that used to protect many in society have been reduced or stripped away.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

I appreciate that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Mr. Doherty.

Next is Ms. Kayabaga, please, for five minutes.

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I would like to go to Mr. Rolfe.

I want to start by making a comment about Indwell in the city of London. When it first came and expanded to London from Hamilton, I was a city councillor. The conversations community members in London were having then are quite different from the conversations we're having now.

Can you touch on the change you've seen since 2018 and 2019, since extending Indwell services within the community of London? How has everybody reacted to that, even in the business community? Also, we have some collaborations with Indwell in the downtown core. Have you seen a shift in conversations about people who are experiencing and living with drug addiction as a disease?

[Steven Rolfe]

In London, we are really pleased to be part of a growing movement of building larger community solutions around housing and integrating health care with housing.

If we look at London, the current situation remains particularly difficult. Being able to offer people some hope by introducing quality housing programs—places where people want to live and can actually afford to live—is a values-based approach where you're looking at treating people with some dignity and inviting people into places where they want to live and want to participate. They would prefer to live in a community and are willing to engage in the hard work.

One thing that often isn't talked about is how hard the work is for tenants when they move in and the label of homelessness gets dropped aside or the challenge of addiction becomes something else. It's a lot of work for those individuals to work toward their health and engage. It's not an easy road for any of them.

For the whole London community, I think we've been able to demonstrate that if you link municipal programming with hospital programming and supportive housing, you create a system of care that is able to start teasing apart what is really a complex situation. The challenge that remains before us is the scale.

In London in particular, we know we don't have enough supportive housing. We know we don't have enough affordable housing. There's no easy path to integrating affordable housing with access to services. It really comes down to saying, “Here's a way forward. This can work, but let's figure out how to make it work better.” How do we increase investment in mental health and addiction services and housing?

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

You touched on something that I think is very important: having supportive housing. Indwell came into the city back in 2018. I remember it very well because I was a city councillor at the time. We very much understood the importance of having it work together with wraparound services. It's about making sure housing is available to people and that they have the supports they need to establish themselves in the community.

Could you speak about the role that supportive housing plays in giving people the motivation they need to escape the cycle of substance abuse? Before you do, I would like to note a comment from a family I know in my community. They had a family member who experienced drug abuse. When he was finally put into an Indwell home, the family said he expressed that it was the first time in his 30-something years of life that he had been able to feel like a human.

Could you touch on the importance of housing in establishing and stabilizing people so they can get to the other side of their struggle?

[Steven Rolfe]

Thank you for that comment. I really appreciate it. It reinforces what we do.

It's absolutely critical. I can give you an example. We recently opened a program in London. The city created the housing and we're providing the support. We're talking about permanent housing. People live in their own unit, and they can access nursing and addiction care. It's an interdisciplinary service that's available.

Everybody came straight off the by-name priority list for homelessness. Most people had either a major mental health issue or a substance use issue. For 50% of the people who came into that building, the primary daily need was wound care, and quite often the wound arose from illicit drug use. You're talking about people emerging from situations of incredible difficulty and complexity.

What supportive housing does is offer an opportunity for people to stabilize. For many of our tenants, it's the first place they've been able to call home in their adult life. That ability to access housing and care is critical to people's survival.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Mr. Rolfe.

Mr. Thériault, you have the floor for two minutes.

[Luc Thériault, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Wright, let's talk about the diversion of safe supply. After the drug bust in Prince George, British Columbia, RCMP Assistant Commissioner John Brewer said that there was no evidence of widespread diversion of safe supply drugs in British Columbia. The Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General of British Columbia claimed the same thing.

However, Fiona Wilson said the following before the committee on April 15, 2024:

My biggest concern when it comes to pills is the number of organized crime groups that are producing counterfeit pills. I saw a photo of this just last week, and you could not distinguish the counterfeit pill from the real prescription pill. The problem is that we have no idea what's in the counterfeit pill, and it could absolutely be deadly.

If the pills aren't in their original dispensing bottles, we can't determine where they come from.

Do you agree with those officials, such as the Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General of British Columbia, who say that there is no evidence of widespread diversion of drugs in the province?

Or do you object to those statements?

[Shaun Wright]

I agree with your point about counterfeit pills being more deadly, as they tend to contain fentanyl. That is definitely an extreme concern.

I believe the statement you referred to was by Assistant Commissioner Brewer, who said there is no proof of widespread diversion. At that time, I was still working for the RCMP, and there was no mechanism to track diverted safe supply. That data collection has now been implemented.

I can tell you from my experience that, once we started receiving complaints about diverted safe supply, we conducted investigations and observed diversion to the illicit market done by individuals. We confirmed that. It was significant. I would say that it was 25% or more.