Mr. Speaker, my colleague raised a number of issues that police officers in my province and across the country have been raising. He clearly articulated the asks from our Attorney General in British Columbia. In British Columbia, which, like the rest of the country but perhaps more so in my province, has very serious problem of organized crime.
I would like the member to expand on the challenges that police officers have in terms of being able to wiretap and follow electronic communications, and the ways in which they are able to improve the manner in which prosecutions take place.
We have a serious challenge right now I know police officers are very frustrated with the manner in which prosecutions take place within our courts.
The other question I have for him goes back to the discourse that took place a little while ago between members of the Conservative Party which illustrated the difference in approach we have on a serious underlying issue affecting organized crime.
In many ways we are dealing with the symptoms of the problem and not the underlying problem. As I said, I go back to Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate for economics, who said, “If you want to go after organized crime, you've got to go after their financial underpinnings”. That is the worst news that organized crime could ever have.
As one of my colleagues from the Conservative Party said, we need to enable people to shrug off addictions. Well, it is not as simple as that. As a physician, addictions are very complicated. They are rooted in neurochemical changes in the brain and extremely difficult to deal with. Many of the people who have substance abuse problems have what we call dual diagnosis. They also have a psychiatric problem.
Some very innovative addiction programs have been implemented. One of them in British Columbia is the NAOMI project started by Dr. Julio Montaner. it is a narcotics substitution program where under a physician's care the person actually receives a narcotic, which severs the tie between the addict and the crime that he or she engages in on the street, and the ties to organized crime.
What was found is that 60% of those hard-core narcotics addicts were off the street, back with their families and leading a life that was within the law. They were able to get back to work and get this treatment that they required.
Unfortunately, the government opposes that. In fact, it is using judicial means and mechanisms to prevent communities in our country from getting access to the medically proven, harm reduction strategies that work and, ultimately, reduce crime, reduce harm, reduce costs and reduce all the things that all of us want to accomplish.
Does my friend, who is a lawyer, not think that the government has a moral obligation to allow communities across our country to have access to the medically proven, harm reduction strategies that work, like the North American opiate medication initiative, the NAOMI project, in Vancouver?