Madam Speaker, Canadians know my hon. colleague has done an extraordinary amount of work on the environment and has taken a national leadership position on behalf of the Liberal Party in this area.
The cost to the system and to taxpayers of somebody on the street in Victoria is about $50,000 a year. The cost to treat somebody is between $8,000 and $12,000 a year, depending on the challenges faced by that person.
There is clearly a financial benefit, a moral benefit and a simple humanitarian benefit for doing this. On average, people who commit crimes to feed their drug addiction problem steal about $.25 million worth of goods that they sell to receive $50,000 to buy their drugs.
Programs like the NAOMI project, a drug substitution project, sever the ties and virtually eliminate the commission of the crimes. They also enable addicts to get back with their families, to go back to work, to obtain skills training and to receive the psychiatric therapy or to deal with other medical issues with which they face.
There are economic, humanitarian and scientific reasons for doing this. All of them support the changes being advocated. None of the evidence supports the direction the government has taken to try to reduce or eliminate harm reduction strategies like Insite and NAOMI.