Madam Speaker, on March 12, during the meeting of the 52nd session of the committee on narcotics and drugs, I rose in the House and asked the government to deal with the recent World Drug Report, which stated:
Urgent steps must be taken to prevent the unravelling of progress that has been made in the past few decades of drug control.
Unfortunately, the government continues to embarrass Canada on the world stage by refusing to back a drug policy that is evidence-based and in step with our international partners who support the four pillars of prevention, treatment, enforcement and harm reduction.
According to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, harm reduction is “any program, policy or intervention that seeks to reduce or minimize the adverse health and social consequences associated with drug use”. Harm reduction focuses on those policies, programs and interventions that seek to reduce or minimize the adverse health and social consequences of drug use without requiring an individual to discontinue drug use.
As we know, this is a government that favours ideology over evidence. At the WHO international AIDS conference in Mexico City last August, the former health minister shocked the medical and international health communities by saying that he had an ethical objection to harm reduction and therefore could not support it as a policy. Not surprisingly, the reaction from the scientific community was swift and unrelenting. Canada was called an embarrassment, out of step with any rational response, and out of step with the rest of the world.
A Toronto Star editorial chastised him for the ideology-over-evidence approach, say that his statements were “vociferous and illogical” and that they fly “in the face of World Health Organization support for such sites as part of a comprehensive approach to reducing HIV and other harms associated with injection drug use”.
At the time, I was compelled to criticize the former minister. Then, at the annual general meeting of the Canadian Medical Association, I was appalled to be sitting in the room as the minister spent his whole annual speech to the doctors of this country chastising them and calling into question their ethics if they participated in these programs of harm reduction.
It is insulting that the minister did not understand that 80% of the Canadian Medical Association members support harm reduction and that evidence shows that harm reduction has positive effects on poor health outcomes associated with drug use. The former president of the CMA, Dr. Brian Day, said:
In rejecting harm reduction as one tool of addiction treatment, the minister is abandoning the most vulnerable members of society.
Harm reduction also lowers the risk of disease transmission and provides education about drug addiction. We have yet to hear from the new Minister of Health on this issue, but I am concerned that as of yet the fourth essential pillar in drug policy is not in action. It is impossible to help someone who is dead.
There are already too many barriers to harm reduction. Individual barriers include the fear of prosecution, inaccurate understanding of the risks, and the fear of lack of confidentiality. Social barriers include the stigma attached to addiction and harm reduction services or cultural beliefs. There are also legal barriers, such as the arrests of harm reduction clients and volunteers. However, the one barrier that we as members of Parliament can work to combat is the political one.
We must give sufficient funding to harm reduction, stop the government from censoring reports that do not back up their backward ideology, and support the evidence-based policies that put the health and safety of Canadians at the forefront.