I think focusing on the Downtown Eastside has been a real problem, and we've been very upset with the video coming from the Leader of the Opposition. Even Ben Perrin, the previous public safety adviser to Stephen Harper, said that no public figure should use real human misery as a backdrop for a political pitch. It is using them as props to peddle snake oil, and it's disgraceful.
For us to use that stereotype when so many of the people dying are construction workers, people in natural resources or people who've had psychic pain or physical pain who were cut off from their medication and who go to the street for their drugs and are using alone and dying alone.... It's really important that we help them. Those are the sons of Moms Stop The Harm. Those are the people we are losing.
We watched that mom in Sudbury put in number 245 and number 246 of the little crosses of all the sons and daughters who have died in the overdose crisis there in Sudbury. This is across this country. It is extraordinarily important that the harm reduction of methadone, suboxone, sublocade and dilaudid and all of those things.... It is really important, but it is about changing our minds.
As we said last week during National Addictions Awareness Week, this is about creating a community of compassion. You cannot underestimate the 42,000 overdoses that were reversed at a safe-consumption site. Those 42,000 people would have been dead.
This is terrible. It's about the toxic drug supply, but it's also about understanding addiction, which is physical. When people are seeking medicine to not be dope sick, it is very, very misguided to think that a one-size-fits-all approach is going to work. We're doing everything we can to stop this national tragedy.