Health Committee on Oct. 25th, 2023

[Luc Thériault, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

That's why I'm suggesting it. I think we're working very hard.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Yes.

If he wants that, it's his decision.

You suggested it, and I can suggest it, but he has the floor for as long as he wants.

Dr. Ellis, please go ahead.

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

To my colleague, we can continue this debate for as long as it takes. That will also, absolutely, give you the opportunity, sir, to have your say on this important topic. I have no issue with that.

However, I think it's clear the issue at hand is related to the fact that we have raised this particular issue of opioids multiple times in the Standing Committee on Health. What has happened? What has changed? Absolutely nothing has changed. What we see is colleagues continuing down an incredibly dangerous path for Canadians.

I need to hit the rewind button for a minute.

Let's underscore what's happening here. Not only are 20-plus Canadians dying a day, but allowing people with depression to be killed at their hand is set to take effect mid-March of 2024 in this Liberal government's MAID regime. Further to that, now there is a proposed framework to allow people with addictions—

[Brendan Hanley, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

It is interesting that I continue to get interrupted, Mr. Chair, when we're talking about an incredibly sensitive part. It's fascinating.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

It's a point of order from Dr. Hanley.

[Brendan Hanley, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Discussions about MAID and allegations about the purpose of MAID are not relevant to this discussion.

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Of course they're not.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

I'm not so sure. I see the link between opioids and medical assistance in dying.

I think, if we get too far into the MAID discussion, there will be a point to be made with regard to relevance. I'm not sure we're there yet.

Dr. Ellis, go ahead.

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Do you know what? It's fascinating to me that the former Liberal speaker—I don't know if that's the right term, but he certainly was elected as a Liberal—was talking about decorum.

What do we have over here? When it becomes uncomfortable, we have colleagues of mine, who know that this is an incredibly important and difficult topic, wanting to interrupt. I think that is a bit baseless. It is juvenile and incredibly inappropriate that we don't want to talk about the issues that we know are being brought forward because of the policies of the Liberal government.

We know it. Everybody here knows it, and do you know what? It's uncomfortable and it's painful and it's unpleasant, yada yada yada—too bad. Canadians are now uncovering the abscess that exists in their own country, which is that Liberal government, supported by these members across from me, where I'm pointing. They need to grow up and decide what side of history they want to be on. That's their choice.

As I was saying, on the MAID regime, which I sadly had to sit through as a member of Parliament—“sadly” because oftentimes it would appear to me that there was a gleeful nature of the Liberals as they brought forward more and more abilities for Canadians to kill themselves—what we saw there, very clearly, is that depression is in its infancy in terms of diagnosis and treatment. Now we will have a regime in this country that is not supported by Canada's psychiatrists. We know that very clearly.

There is one psychiatrist on that committee who continues to push forward that agenda, and now what do we see? We see other folks who want to take advantage of that and are suddenly saying: “Hey, you know what? People, sadly, are addicted to drugs. Let's let them end their lives.” My colleague here has an interesting article with pictures of people who died of overdoses and pictures of them as children. Everyone around this table and anyone who's listening out there knows that no kid in this country grew up saying, “I wish that, when I grow up, I will be addicted to drugs.”

This safer/safe, government-sponsored, hydromorphone-doling-out-for-free program is allowing them to continue to be addicted to drugs. That is a very sad state of affairs in this country, especially when.... I don't even know how many Liberals there are in the House of Commons. There are too many—I know that. They know the difference, and they refuse to stand up and be counted and to understand that this is an incredibly slippery slope that we are going down.

Not only are we now providing drug addicts with drugs for free—drugs that we know are being sold from the investigative reports of people like Adam Zivo and also from the physicians my colleague named and the letters they've sent to this government, and from other physicians who are too afraid to come forward because they're afraid their professional reputations will be sullied by this Liberal government—but we continue to allow this to happen. Shame, shame, shame. That's what I say—shame.

To go back to this original letter that we have received from Dr. Robert Cooper, which was sent to, again, the Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, it says that it is reckless for people suffering from addictions, as it is not supervised to ensure it is taken safely in the manner intended by the manufacturer. Also, it is provided in a way so that it can be and is being sold, with the funds utilized to purchase even more potent and dangerous opioids such as fentanyl.

We hear that this is the enemy: a toxic supply. This is what the Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, who came before this committee before, said: that this is a dangerous drug, that it's toxic, but if we give them something else, then they'll stop using fentanyl.

Sadly, we know that is the high the people who are addicted to drugs want. They want a high from fentanyl. All they are doing, very simply, is taking the hydromorphone that is being supplied for free and selling it to kids and other people who have never used opioids before, and they are then buying fentanyl with the money.

This is not a great stretch of imagination or a fantasy or the unicorns and fairy dust that we hear from this Liberal government on other topics. This is fact that is being reported from people who work in the system. This is being reported by people who use the drugs on the street.

Why do I say it slowly? It's because it appears that is the only way it can be heard by my Liberal colleagues. Why is it that we need to talk forever in this committee to get anything through? It's because otherwise there'll be a motion to adjourn the debate on this, which we have already seen.

I shall continue.

It is provided with a reckless disregard for our communities, as it has increased the availability of high-potency pharmaceutical-grade opioids on our streets and increased the number of people suffering from addiction. They are seeing more people. These are addictions experts. This is what they do. They are seeing more and more people coming and saying, “Wow, I have a problem with drugs and—guess what—I had free hydromorphone supplied by the government” or “I got the free hydromorphone supplied by the government, and—guess what I did with it—I sold it and bought something else with it.”

They are selling it. Are they buying more fentanyl? They probably are. Are they trying to live because of the incredible crushing inflation and cost-of-living crisis that this Liberal government has created through their reckless spending? Yes, of course they are. If they can't afford to put a roof over their heads, the likelihood, of course, of their being addicted to opioids is probably greater. If they're addicted to opioids, it is much more difficult for them to put a roof over their heads. Can they feed themselves? They can't do that well. Can they heat their homes? Well, they don't have any homes to heat. We know that very clearly.

Continuing to punish Canadians is what this Liberal government is bent on doing with their NDP coalition partners.

Third, it is reckless, a complete failure of monitoring and supervision, and an abrogation of the responsibility to do so, with an apparent reliance on the criminal justice system to prevent diversion when it is widely known that the criminal justice system has already failed to prevent the sale of opioids during the current opioid epidemic.

Colleagues, one of the things that I think are important for us to begin to understand is how related this epidemic that we have is to the OxyContin crisis. We know very clearly that in popular literature—and if you're not a student of history, you can look at Netflix, on which there is a series called Painkiller. We know very clearly that this tragedy that exists on Canadian and American streets at the current time is realistically related to the promotion and marketing of OxyContin.

There is an interesting article in the American Journal of Public Health entitled exactly that, “The Promotion and Marketing of OxyContin: Commercial Triumph, Public Health Tragedy”. This public health tragedy continues.

We know very clearly from this article.... It talks about controlled drugs. It has an American flavour to it and certainly it's not a style that we talk about in Canada, but we talk about opioids. Certainly realistically they are controlled drugs in terms of how they are supposed to be prescribed and given out in a very controlled manner by responsible physicians to those who need them, who we now know, as a cautionary tale, are not very common.

This article starts:

Controlled drugs, with their potential for abuse and diversion, can pose public health risks that are different from—and more problematic than—those of uncontrolled drugs when they are overpromoted and highly prescribed.

We have an asinine situation now where these drugs are not only not prescribed, but they don't cost anything. They're not just highly prescribed; they're highly given out. There is no place in the world where anyone could possibly fathom that. Not only are these drugs, as we clearly know, dangerous and should be controlled, but they are now being given out by this government.

What did I say previously about fentanyl? We talked about fentanyl. What makes it so dangerous?

This is from Canada.ca:

It is 20 to 40 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. This makes the risk of accidental overdose very high.

Realistically, we know that hydromorphone is a little less potent than fentanyl—understandably. It is dosed in milligrams, not micrograms. We know very clearly that is very different. I understand that. That being said, for those who don't partake in opioids or haven't had the need to use opioids, we know these drugs are incredibly dangerous. Not only are they now highly prescribed; they are just given out. They are given out for free. How does that make any sense?

When we look at this.... This talks about an “in-depth analysis of the promotion and marketing of OxyContin”, which is also known as oxycodone. We know that:

When Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin in 1996, it was aggressively marketed and highly promoted. Sales grew from $48 million in 1996 to almost $1.1 billion in 2000.

Listen to this:

The high availability of OxyContin correlated with increased abuse, diversion, and addiction, and by 2004 OxyContin had become a leading drug of abuse in the United States.

It is certainly not different in Canada.

That was in 2004. It had a $1-billion market in 2000 in the United States, and in 2004, it had become the leading drug of abuse in the United States. That was in 2004. That was 19 years ago.

Nineteen years ago, everybody, it seems, knew that OxyContin was a leading drug of abuse in the United States, and here we are, decriminalizing.... I'm sorry. We are not just decriminalizing drugs in this crazed experiment, but we have a government that is giving out opioids—exceedingly potent opioids—for free. It's giving them away.

If anyone out there could possibly make any sense of the fact that we know what happened, as a cautionary tale, with OxyContin, oxycodone, beginning in the United States and the trickle-down effect into Canada, and now we have a government that seems to.... I can't even.... It defies my ability to understand how a government could possibly think that giving its cousin out for free would help an addiction, an overdose, an overdose death, homelessness, affordability or a cost of living crisis get any better. That does not make any sense at all. It is mind-boggling and mind-numbing. I don't have any ability to understand that.

This article continues:

Under current regulations, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is limited in its oversight of the marketing and promotion of controlled drugs. However, fundamental changes in the promotion and marketing of controlled drugs by the pharmaceutical industry, and an enhanced capacity of the FDA to regulate and monitor such promotion, can positively affect public health.

What we're talking about here is asking a pharmaceutical industry to change how these drugs are promoted and regulated.

What we have come to is a government that has effectively deregulated, unregulated and dysregulated. It has totally and absolutely gone against regulations by not just promoting a potent opioid but also giving it away for free. Think about it. If I have a product, why would I need to promote it if my objective is simply to give it away? I don't need to promote it if I'm giving it away.

On one side, we have a government in the United States realizing that pharmaceutical industries need to be more regulated in their promotion of opioids. On the other, we have a government north of the border giving away opioids and suggesting that, in the land of unicorns and fairy dust, this is making the opioid crisis—and again I'd use the superlative of crisis—better. It's doing that mind-numbingly, without any ability for me to understand that. When we go on and begin to understand that, we.... Some people say, “This is not related to hydromorphone or fentanyl.”

This article talks about it:

OxyContin’s commercial success did not depend on the merits of the drug compared with other available opioid preparations. The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics concluded in 2001 [22 years ago] that oxycodone offered no advantage over appropriate doses of other potent opioids.

For people out there to say that hydromorphone is better than fentanyl or oxycodone.... Clearly, we know that, in esteemed, useful and well-read medical journals, this is absolutely total hogwash. There is no difference among these opioids at all. They are all incredibly dangerous. Where does that leave us? That leaves us....

Again, when we look at this, there are some other things here that talk about the relative potencies, but I think I will leave that out. I may come back to it.

I'll continue on:

The promotion and marketing of OxyContin occurred during a recent trend in the liberalization of the use of opioids in the treatment of pain, particularly for chronic non–cancer-related pain. Purdue pursued an “aggressive” campaign to promote the use of opioids in general and OxyContin in particular. In 2001 alone, the company spent $200 million [U.S.] in an array of approaches to market and promote OxyContin.

When you begin to look at that, it becomes very clear. I was a practising physician during those days. I clearly remember many edicts coming out of the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian College of Family Physicians and—I'm not entirely sure, but probably—the Canadian Pain Society suggesting that someone treating chronic non-cancer pain.... If physicians were not prescribing enough opioids to treat that pain, they were bad doctors.

Do you know what? That was wrong. We know it was wrong, but those of us who are physicians in this room know it happened. We saw those edicts come out of the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian College of Family Physicians and, as I said, probably the Canadian Pain Society, and we know in retrospect that was wrong. There were changes that came forward. They talked to physicians about how they should prescribe opioids in a more responsible fashion. There were also edicts that subsequently came out talking about how much morphine equivalence of opioid should be prescribed, because we knew these substances were being over-prescribed in a highly regulated fashion already.

Now what do we have? We have a government giving them away for free and continuing to ignore their own advice, which says that these substances need to be prescribed very carefully in small quantities and for short periods of time. We have a government giving them away for free in gigantic quantities for unlimited periods of time. Now, if that is not the exact opposite, I don't know what is.

We have people getting eight-milligram tablets of hydromorphone in quantities of—depending on which article you want to read from Adam Zivo—26, 32 or 34 tablets at a time. Now, if that is not big quantities of high-potency opioids given out in an unrestricted, long-term fashion, I don't know what is. This is the exact opposite of a careful, short-term, low-dose prescribing of opioids, which was suggested to physicians who should be controlling this.

It is mindless, and it continues to this day. Folks around this table then want to say, “Why is it? Why do Conservatives want to talk about opioids? Why do they want to talk incessantly about this?” Do you know what? It's because clearly the Liberal government does not get it. Until we say things over and over again, almost ad nauseam, it clearly appears not to be understood.

I do know that one of my colleagues, my colleague from the Bloc, referenced a motion that has been moved—I don't know whether it's been moved, but it's been tabled—to talk about the opioid experiment. If we had confidence on this side of the chamber we're in this evening that our colleagues would actually do the study, then maybe we wouldn't have to be here tonight talking about this over and over again.

One of my colleagues even deemed this, in this motion, to be an opioid experiment. Do you know what? When you have an experiment that has gone awry and is causing harm, every medical journal out there knows that you stop that experiment early. That's what you do. You don't continue it on. When you realize that people are dying because of the drug that you're using, you don't continue to do the experiment. You stop it. You stop the experiment, but what are the geniuses in the Liberal government doing? They are doubling down.

They are doubling down: “Let's fight the Conservatives on this.” We heard this from my colleague this evening. We have those on the opposite side who think this is a waste of time, that all we're doing is wanting to filibuster to get rid of Bill C-293. Really? There is enough in Bill C-293 that we could have talked about it for 10 more years. It's a terrible piece of legislation. It's utterly ridiculous. It is fraught with incredible jurisdictional contradictions, which my Bloc colleague could have talked about for the next six years, at least, on his own. He brought an expert here to talk about Bill C-293, and he talked about how bad the jurisdictional infractions were with respect to his great province of Quebec. Now it is suddenly only the Conservatives who are trying to get rid of Bill C-293.

I had an opportunity today to meet with the deans of the agricultural and veterinarian schools from across our great country. They have a huge problem with Bill C-293. I read them sections of the bill, and I informed them that we had one meeting here with witnesses on Bill C-293.

They were aghast when they read sections of Bill C-293. When I told them that we had one meeting with witnesses, they couldn't believe it. To think that a bill wants to influence the food that we eat and how it's produced here in this country—we know that farmers are the greatest stewards of farmland and of farm animals in this entire country—then we have the audacity of Liberal members suggesting we are using opioids as a way to filibuster Bill C-293. It's hogwash. It's petty politics—absolutely incredulous.

When I begin to look at the topic at hand, which I will return to, understanding the scourge that opioids have caused and continue to cause for innumerable Canadians, this is absolutely an unacceptable and untenable position.

We know—again, very clearly—that the cost of living crisis this government has created is continuing to cause significant problems for Canadians. I would suggest to you that this opioid crisis is allowing this to be perpetuated. I quote:

From 1996 to 2001, Purdue conducted more than 40 national pain-management and speaker-training conferences at resorts in Florida, Arizona, and California. More than 5000 physicians, pharmacists, and nurses attended these all-expenses-paid symposia, where they were recruited and trained for Purdue's national speaker bureau. It is well documented that this type of pharmaceutical company symposium influences physicians’ prescribing, even though the physicians who attend such symposia believe that such enticements do not alter their prescribing patterns.

Certainly, that's been a huge argument inside the medical community for a long time. Isn't it interesting, though, colleagues? What we're talking about is how a company could influence the prescribing habits of physicians, and what we have now is these drugs being given out for free and Liberal colleagues suggesting that this is an appropriate and acceptable type of behaviour.

As I said, we have a scholarly article talking about this being inappropriate. It's inappropriate to try to influence physicians, who are the appropriate people to write prescriptions. It's inappropriate for them to be influenced to write more prescriptions, but it's not inappropriate for a government to give away the same drugs for free. Wow. Again, I can't even wrap my mind around how that would make any sense at all. It is absolute nonsense. That's what it is.

This article goes on and talks about how they possibly did this, how much money they spent to try to change physicians' minds, how many doctors they convinced to do this and that they gave them fishing hats, stuffed plush toys and CDs. When you look at this now, what are we doing? You don't need to influence doctors, because the Liberal government is giving away opioids for free.

Don't worry, Canadians, because when you're addicted to these opioids that this Liberal-NDP coalition is giving you for free in its crazed experiment, what are they going to do? They're going to kill you.

It's nonsense. It's absolute nonsense to continue to allow the propagation of medical assistance in dying—the euphemism by which it has become known—a procedure that was destined for those who had uncontrolled pain and a reasonable, foreseeable death, to now being for folks who have suffering because of homelessness. Perhaps it's because they can't find a job, they can't afford a house because of the 40-year high inflation of this Liberal government, or they can't afford to feed themselves, put a roof over their heads and heat their homes for winter because they are addicted to opioids. This government is culpable in the creation of this problem.

We are now going to say, “Let's make the problem go away. Let's simply make it go away.” You know what the old saying is: Dead men can't talk. Let's let them go away and not be a problem, because we—not me and not those of us on this side, but this NDP-Liberal coalition—have created a problem that is uncomfortable. I cannot understand why they want to continue to stand up and defend it, and do not have the guts and the good decency to step forward and say, “This is wrong. We made a mistake.”

That's what grown-ups do when they make mistakes. They admit they're wrong and they move on from their mistakes.

This country has trusted them to run this country for eight long and miserable years. What do we have? We have an opioid crisis that is beyond parallel. I'll just go back to that number I talked about earlier. That number went from one person dying every three days to more than 20 people dying every single day in this country due to opioids.

This experiment is being perpetuated by this NDP-Liberal government coalition. They will not back down from their position. No matter what happens, it is very clear they won't back down. When my colleagues begin asking why we need to talk incessantly about a problem, it's because they don't get it. That is why.

We know very clearly that the NDP member of this committee is a full-blown supporter drug decriminalization and the Liberal members have a boss and a PMO bent on safe supply. That makes me able to really understand why they're reluctant to talk about this topic. We look at Mr. Davies' provincial counterparts in the B.C. NDP as prime examples. Tent cities, crime, chaos, drugs and disorder have become the norm under their leadership, where drug overdose is now the leading cause of death for kids between the ages of 10 and 18.

Do you know what, colleagues? I need to read that again: Drug overdose is now the leading cause of death for kids between the ages of 10 and 18. I have three grown children and I have two grandchildren. This scares the daylights out of me because this is not just in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Edmonton and every other big city. This is in every town and village across this great country of ours.

Folks, believe it or not, for roughly the past year, the Prime Minister and the leader of the NDP authorized the B.C. government to allow crack, heroine, cocaine and fentanyl around children's playgrounds. They had to then create another edict, suddenly, to say that you can't have drugs around playgrounds and in areas that children frequent.

Are you kidding me? Do we think that it is suddenly an acceptable part of Canadian life to have these drugs around where families and children are all the time? It took the year before an election recently for them to walk this policy back and before they finally prohibited open air drug use around these areas. Colleagues, we know that this happened within the last one month. Wow, you shouldn't use drugs around kids. It's shameful.

You would think that after eight long and miserable years of this Liberal government, there would be a change of heart. Do you know what? I know very clearly that there is not a change of heart. Tonight we saw the incredulous activities of colleagues on the opposite side, with the NDP-Liberal coalition suggesting that this was a simple ploy by Conservatives to get around Bill C-293.

Bill C-293 is a ridiculous piece of legislation that allows this Liberal government to not have an inquiry with respect to their pandemic response. As I said, it creates incredible jurisdictional difficulties related to attempting to force Canadians to change how they farm this great land and how they produce protein for Canadians. It's interesting. I'll go back to the deans of agriculture and veterinary colleges today. They know and they've said out loud that Canada could be the entire breadbasket for the world.

What do we have? We have the NDP-Liberal coalition wanting to stand in the way of that. They say that farmers are mean people and that they're mean to their animals. They are mean. They don't know how to take care of animals. They haven't done it ever. They are bad stewards of the land. They're over-users of fertilizers, and they are unknowledgeable in practices of farming.

Do we really want to believe this? It's shocking. It is incredibly shocking. My friends, this is the track that the NDP-Liberal coalition wants you to go down. This is the track where they want Canadians to begin to believe that farmers are bad people. I know a lot of farmers. They are not bad people. They are perhaps the most optimistic people I have ever met. To be a farmer, you have to be optimistic. Who could possibly think, at the beginning of every growing season, that you're going to have enough rain and enough sun—

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

I have a point of order. If I'm not mistaken, we are debating Mr. Doherty's motion on opioid overdose. However, Mr. Ellis has strayed back, ironically, to the actual item on the agenda. That was supposed to be Mr. Erskine-Smith's bill on pandemic response, which does deal with some of the issues that Mr. Ellis is speaking about. I think he needs to be called to order and to confine his remarks to the motion under discussion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Mr. Davies.

Dr. Ellis, you are wandering from the topic. I don't see the connection. It's been a long address so it's understandable, but perhaps you could focus in.

While I have you.... You banged the table a couple of times. We got a note from the translation folks that it didn't feel very good. You haven't done it in the last 10 or 12 minutes, so I haven't had a chance to come and mention it to you.

You still have the floor. We have about one minute left in our allotted time. At any time, at 9:30 or later, a motion to adjourn would be in order.

Go ahead, Dr. Ellis.

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Thank you very much, Chair.

My deep apologies to the translators. The passion, I'm afraid, overtook me, and I apologize deeply for that.

That being said, why did I wander back to the bill at hand? Because there were accusations around this table that said this was a filibuster to get rid of Bill C-293.

I would love nothing more than to continue to talk about this bill. Sadly, there's something that is way more pressing when 20 Canadians a day are dying; 20-plus Canadians a day are dying because of a failed NDP-Liberal coalition experiment. Unfortunately, the NDP member, who believes himself to be the arbiter of this committee, continues to want to interrupt, even though perhaps, if closer attention was paid to the incredibly important words I'm saying, he would understand the connection to the injustice attempted upon the Conservatives in suggesting that this was a filibuster related to Bill C-293.

That is why I needed to make that connection to the matter at hand, related to homelessness and the ongoing opioid experiment, which continues to be perpetrated, propagated and perpetuated by the petulant Liberals. That causes great consternation for all of us who sit on this side, the Conservative side of the House.

What we know very clearly is that safe supply is a failure. It is a failure, an abject failure. It doesn't matter which euphemism we wish to say about it, whether we want to call it “safe supply” or “safer supply” or “safest supply”. Again, those are the superlatives we have at our use in the English language. Whichever one we want to use, we know that it is an experiment, and we know that it has failed. We know very clearly that this is a lesson from history. Not to be too trite, but we know that those who refuse to listen to, know or believe history are doomed to repeat it.

When we look back at the Purdue Pharma fiasco, at the tragedy, as mentioned in this article, we know very clearly that Purdue Pharma misrepresented the risk of addiction. As this article talks about, there was a systematic effort to minimize the risk of addiction and the use of opioids for the treatment of “chronic non-cancer-related pain”. One of the most critical issues regarding the use of opioids in the treatment of chronic non-cancer pain is the potential of iatrogenic addiction. I'll come back to that.

The article states, “The lifetime prevalence of addictive disorders has been estimated at 3% to 16% of the general population.” When we look at that, what does that mean? It means, for those being prescribed opioids for chronic non-cancer pain, that even by giving them opioids there was a likelihood that they were going to become addicted to them.

Now what are we doing? At the current time, this NDP-Liberal government is not prescribing them carefully in small quantities and in small dosage amounts. They are giving these medications to Canadians for free in large quantities: an incredibly potent opioid called hydromorphone. When we look at that, colleagues, that is anathema to the suggestion that, after the historical tragic events related to Purdue Pharma, we all need to hear the lessons thereof, such that we are now doomed to repeat them, and that is exactly what we shall do.

Mr. Chair, if I may, may I have a point of clarification? If I agree to adjourn this meeting, will I still have the floor when we pick it up next time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Not necessarily. An adjournment of the meeting.... Actually, at the next meeting, I believe we have witnesses, so if we adjourn the meeting, we would proceed with the agenda for the next meeting. Unless this was actually on the agenda, it wouldn't be automatic, Dr. Ellis.

We are at the point, Dr. Ellis, where we're at risk of losing our resources, so a motion to adjourn would be a good idea regardless of the consequences, because we're not going to have the support that we need to continue.

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Chair, I believe this topic is absolutely essential to the Canadian narrative at the current time. For that reason, if you would like me to stop, I am happy to hear you say that, because I don't want to give up the floor. I do want to continue with this, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Okay. Thank you for that invitation.

Colleagues, we will not have resources to go any further.

Is it the will of the committee to adjourn the meeting?

[Robert Gordon Kitchen, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

If not, suspend.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

A motion to adjourn is not debatable.

Is it the will of the committee to adjourn?

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

On a point of order, Chair, I actually didn't hear a motion to adjourn this meeting. I did hear the chair talk about adjourning the meeting, but there was no motion to adjourn.

I believe, if I heard correctly, that I did have a motion to suspend the meeting from my honourable colleague.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

All right. There isn't a motion to adjourn before the committee. I invited one and didn't receive one.

It appears that there is a motion to suspend. The committee is scheduled to meet next on Monday, so is it the will of the committee to suspend this meeting until Monday at 11 a.m.?

[Brendan Hanley, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, I did not hear a motion to suspend.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Yes, I did. Dr. Kitchen moved a motion to suspend.

[Brendan Hanley, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Excuse me, but I don't believe Dr. Kitchen had the floor, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Yes, Dr. Kitchen didn't have the floor. You are correct.

Dr. Ellis had the floor, and he still has the floor.

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

I will move a motion to suspend, Chair.