Madam Speaker, it is a privilege to work with my hon. colleague on the health committee. I very much respect his contributions to that committee, but with the greatest of respect, I must vehemently disagree with a number of the theses he is advocating here today.
If health policy is to be based on evidence and not on ideology, then we must look to the best evidence we have. The validity and accomplishments of safe injection sites were exhaustively examined by the Supreme Court of Canada when it ruled on the Insite case back in 2011. In that case, mountains of evidence were placed before the court, including from The Lancet, which is one of the world's most respected medical journals. Evidence gathered around Insite itself showed that it results in fewer overdoses, and in fact, no deaths. There has not been a single death at a supervised injection site in this country ever. As my colleague from Edmonton Strathcona said, it results in there being less open drug use in the streets, less crime, and fewer discarded needles in our communities as well.
His own government brought in legislation that did permit safe injection sites to open, albeit it made it extremely difficult to open them. His own government must have acknowledged that there was some value to this, or perhaps it was just forced to do so by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Why did his government do nothing about the CBSA's prohibition on opening envelopes under 30 grams, which it took the present government to fix, so that we could stop the flow of fentanyl into this country? Why did his government not catch that and do something about it?