Mr. Speaker, it is absolutely shocking that the government has not gone forward to extend the life of Insite, the safe injection site in Vancouver.
It is a facility that has broad, strong public support across the community in Vancouver. Vancouverites are proud that people came together from all levels of government, the community and the drug user community, to come up with a new approach to public policy that would actually save lives, prevent the spread of disease and get drug use off the streets and out of the back allies into a safe location where professional health care workers could offer advice and get people into treatment programs when they are ready to take that important step.
I think there is widespread recognition across the community that Insite has been an important step forward in how our society deals with drug abuse.
In report after report, the Conservatives continue to say the same thing. However, these effects are known, they are provable and it is happening at Insite. Even the government's own hand-picked panel, which, apparently, has just reported, said exactly the same thing, that this was worthy of the government's support and that the goals it set out to achieve were being achieved.
We need to move forward with that. This kind of facility needs to be introduced into other communities where there is interest to do it. There are other communities across the country that want to follow that example and go down that same road because they know it is a positive way of affecting the lives of people who are drug addicted. It is a positive way of affecting the community to ensure something is being done to help people get the assistance they need and to save lives.
We need to see an expansion of this kind of project, not constantly having to worry about the short leash on which the government seems to have that project. The sooner we can extend this project and ensure it has a permanent place as one of the strategies toward dealing with drug addiction and drug use in Canada the better.
It is not the only policy but it is certainly one piece of the puzzle that is absolutely crucial. A measly 2.6% of drug policy money going toward harm reduction is absolutely inappropriate. We need to restrike the balance of how we spend money on drug issues. We need to ensure that treatment, harm reduction and prevention receive a significantly larger piece of the pie. We know those are the areas that have proven to make real change in the country, in the lives of Canadians, in the lives of people who are addicted to drugs, in the lives of drug users, in the lives of families who care about them and in the life of the community around them. Those are the things that have done it effectively.
The research and the experience is all there. The negative experience of our neighbours to the south is there. All that information is before us and we should be finally putting that into a public policy framework in Canada. We need good public policy. The Ottawa Citizen has said that the kind of route that the government is on is just bad public policy. I think that has been proven time and again. We need to turn that around. We need to get down the right path and show support for things that actually do work in this regard.