Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to rise in the House for the second time to speak to Bill C-2, because this bill is very important to me. Unfortunately, I have known people suffering from addiction. I say “suffering from” because this is not a choice. These people need care.
To add some perspective, Bill C-2 is very dangerous. This is a Conservative attempt to deprive us of supervised injection sites such as InSite in Vancouver.
The Conservatives' bill adds a list of conditions for opening a supervised injection site in a community that are quite complex and difficult to meet. I find this quite unfortunate.
In my speech, I talked about safety on the streets, because our Conservative friends claim they are doing this for the sake of safety. However, I would much prefer seeing people who inject drugs do so in a specific place in the city rather than finding syringes everywhere. I also pointed to the absurdity of the Conservatives' decision to refer this bill to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, rather than the Standing Committee on Health. That is rich.
That proves that the Conservatives do not believe that supervised injection sites are a health issue. However, these sites are not just places where people go to get high together. These are places where health professionals provide supervision, prevention and guidance. The fact that the Conservatives are sending this bill to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security tells me, on one hand, that they want to scare people and confuse the facts about supervised injection sites, and on the other, that so many health professionals support supervised injection sites that the Conservatives are having trouble finding enough witnesses to support their views on health. This is what I said in my first speech.
At this time, Canada has one supervised injection site, InSite. It was created as part of a public health plan by the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and its community partners following a dramatic increase in overdose deaths in Vancouver between 1987 and 1993. At the time, the Vancouver area was also seeing a dramatic rise in the rates of communicable diseases spread by injection drug use, including hepatitis A, B and C and HIV/AIDS.
World AIDS Day is coming up in a few days, on December 1, so I would like to take a moment to talk about that. The Canadian AIDS Society, which was founded about 20 years ago, does excellent work. It is too bad that the Conservatives do not believe in the benefits of supervised injection sites, because sites such as InSite help reduce the number of people with AIDS every year.
The Conservatives like to talk about the economy. We can significantly reduce health care costs related to communicable diseases spread by injection drug use. For instance, AIDS can be transmitted sexually as well as by dirty needles. Supervised injection sites tackle this problem by distributing clean needles. Little things like that help. In my riding, an organization called À deux mains distributes clean needs to injection drug users.
I do not have the figures for hepatitis, but I have some pretty incredible figures for AIDS from a study done in 2008. I would like to share the total economic losses associated with each individual who is HIV-positive.
This was in 2009. If we factor in inflation, the numbers might be a bit higher today.
For every HIV-positive person, the estimated cost is $250,000 in health care, $670,000 in terms of productivity and $380,000 in terms of quality of life. I am not sure what, specifically, is meant by quality of life, but I imagine it has to do with everything that comes with daily life, such as productivity, food and morale, which must be at rock bottom.
These numbers from the Canadian AIDS Society add up to a total of $1,300,000 per person. According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, roughly 69,000 people in Canada had AIDS in 2011, making the total cost $4,031,490,000. That is a lot of money. I am not saying that all those people were infected by dirty needles, but some of them were. We could save a lot of money.
It is unfortunate that most bills, especially Conservative bills, focus on healing instead of prevention. The Conservatives never consider prevention. The same is true when it comes to crime. There is no prevention, just healing. People are sent to prison where no one will look after them. It is sad.
No one chooses to be an addict. We rarely talk about the social determinants of health. If you go to Vancouver East you will see that the people who live there are not very rich. They did not get everything handed to them in life. I am very fortunate. I come from an educated family. My parents taught me the importance of staying away from drugs, going to school and getting a job.
Not everyone is lucky enough to be born into those circumstances. Through no fault of their own, people end up with rather serious addictions. They shoot up drugs. I imagine that no one plans to get to that stage. I doubt they woke up one morning and decided to become a heroin addict. We have a duty as a society to help them.
I would like to come back to the issue of discarded needles that turn up all over the place. When I found out that I was going to give a speech, I checked the websites of major Canadian cities. The Conservatives say that they do not want these needles in their backyards. However, the websites of Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and Montreal indicate that all these cities have a program to retrieve used needles found on the streets.
The Ottawa website, for example, has an 11-step set of instructions for what to do with a needle found on the street. If the city puts this on its website, there must be a lot of discarded needles. Moreover, if on its site it says to be careful and that children should never touch used needles, that must be because needles can be found where they live. This is rather worrisome.
This is also the case for Montreal. Look at the website and this is one of the first things you will read: “In order to take collective action to reduce the problem of discarded needles...”. Therefore, the problem exists. We know that there are groups in Montreal that would like to establish supervised injection sites, but Bill C-2, which the Conservatives will unfortunately pass, will block them. Thus, people will keep discarding needles in the streets.
In closing, I would like to thank the Montreal organizations that pick up these needles. Thank you to À deux mains, located in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, which is in my riding, Cactus Montréal, Spectre de rue, Pacte de rue, L'Unité d'intervention mobile L'Anonyme, Dopamine and Le Préfixe, and also several CLSCs.
These are not establishments where you go to take drugs; their mandate is prevention. I urge my colleagues to vote against this government bill, because it will be detrimental to the health of our communities.