Mr. Speaker, Canada is going through a deadly opioid overdose crisis that is so severe and widespread that few Canadians are untouched by it.
In my home province of British Columbia alone, 800 more people are expected to die from opioid overdoses than from motor vehicle accidents this year. In Ontario, opioid overdose is the third leading cause of accidental death, and one out of every eight deaths in Ontario among young adults is related to an opioid overdose tragedy. Last year, 274 people in Alberta died from overdosing on the opioid fentanyl, a drug so powerful that a single particle the size of a salt grain is enough to cause an overdose and two are enough to kill. For the country as a whole, opioid overdoses are expected to claim an estimated 2,000 lives by the end of this year. That is one Canadian dying every four hours.
Although, this has been a national crisis for well over a year, the response of the federal government has been unacceptably slow, leaving individual jurisdictions to tackle this crisis alone. For example, B.C. is currently grappling with a massive influx of fentanyl that led to 238 deaths in the first half of this year alone, leaving Dr. Perry Kendall, B.C.'s chief health officer, to declare a public health emergency for the first time ever in B.C. history.
That is why I moved a motion at the health committee to launch an emergency study to provide recommendations for immediate federal action to tackle Canada's overdose epidemic. This morning, the committee began its study. Hearing from witnesses representing Health Canada, the Canadian Institute for Health Information, the RCMP, the CBSA, and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, we learned a number of cogent and sometimes disturbing facts. Among these are the following.
The federal government has not declared the overdose a public health emergency, even though it recognizes that it displays the characteristics of one and is being regarded as one.
In spite of the overwhelming evidence supporting safe injection sites, the federal government stubbornly refuses to repeal Bill C-2, Conservative legislation that the former Liberal health critic said was deliberately designed to prevent sites from opening.
We learned that the government has no plans to invest any new funding to expand much needed treatment for addictions in partnership with the provinces and territories. We also learned that in the absence of national data on opioid prescribing and overdoses, we have no way to capture the full extent of this crisis. Instead, we continue to rely on fragmented and incomplete data to identify the policy changes most likely to address the overdose epidemic.
Despite being successfully employed by the Vancouver Police Department for a decade, we learned that the RCMP hasn't even considered a policy of non-attendance at 911 calls for overdoses. We also learned that Ottawa has not moved to restrict access to devices involved with drug production, such as pill presses and tableting machines, and Canada will not have new prescribing guidelines for opioids until 2017.
We learned that the CBSA lacks the statutory power to open containers smaller than 30 grams to halt opioid trafficking at our borders. This means that traffickers who mail fentanyl to Canada in envelopes under 30 grams will never have their shipments opened under current legislation. Instead, CBSA will call them and request their permission to open the envelopes.
Given the severity of this overdose crisis, more urgent action is needed. When will the federal government finally step up and show the leadership necessary to more effectively confront the opioid overdose epidemic facing our nation and killing our citizens?