Thank you very much.
First of all, I want to thank my friend Mr. Lawton for the subamendment. The effect of it is to go back to the original intent of the bill, which is to provide restitution to frontline services that are directly providing services to victims of an offence, as opposed to broadening it unconditionally.
I want to make a brief submission about the intent of the bill and what Conservatives believe should have been left out of the bill. The reason I make the submission right now is that, if LIB-1 passes, it would make all Conservative amendments that were proposed to this legislation moot.
In my brief submission, I want to turn the committee's attention to...remember a woman named Karolina Huebner-Makurat, a 44-year-old mother of two, who died in hospital after she was hit by a stray bullet outside a supervised consumption site in Leslieville on July 7, 2023. This was a shooting that rocked, that shocked the city of Toronto. It took a couple of days to understand the context of Karolina's death. It became apparent that she was a bystander outside of the Leslieville consumption site, where several drug traffickers were subjected to a robbery. In the course of that robbery, gunfire was exchanged, and this mother, an innocent person crossing the street, was killed.
For a long time, Conservatives have been saying that, regrettably, supervised consumption sites don't address the issue. They perpetuate addiction. Regrettably, they delay the inevitable. Since the Liberal government took office in 2015, more than 50,000 Canadians have died of overdose. We all agree that we have an overdose crisis in this country; what we can't agree on is the remedy.
Conservatives always urge treatment. We urge rehabilitation, but we don't, conceptually, agree with drug consumption sites that provide self-supply—safe supply, presumably—and that provide paraphernalia. A couple of years ago at this committee, we heard from the London chief of police, who said that most of the safe supply that is handed out in these institutions ends up on the street, where it's trafficked for other narcotics. We even hear, from the NDP government in British Columbia, that they now believe that safe consumption sites have led to more tragedy rather than less, and that it has been a very poor experience. What the CPC amendment sought to do, what Mr. Lawton's amendment sought to do in part and what my proposed amendment directly sought was to have drug consumption sites omitted from this bill as organizations that could receive restitution, if such is ordered.
I'm blessed to represent the great riding of North York, which was renamed last week, pursuant to Bill C-25. I'm blessed to have the wonderful community of Downsview included in my riding. My constituency office is located at the intersection of Keele and Wilson.
We know that there's a City of Toronto election under way. One key issue in that election is supervised consumption sites and, specifically, Mayor Olivia Chow's proposal for 20 homeless shelters to be located directly in residential neighbourhoods. We all know that there is a homelessness crisis in Canada's major metropolises and in my beloved city of Toronto specifically. Regrettably, in the last couple of years, as a standard operating procedure, every homeless shelter in Toronto acts as a safe injection site.
They all have safe rooms. They all provide drug paraphernalia like pipes and needles. The City of Toronto is proposing a homeless shelter at 1220 Wilson Avenue, which will be located directly between the Pierre Laporte Middle School—