Mr. Speaker, I wan to thank the member for the important question, and to thank his colleague, the member for Vancouver Kingsway, for the kind words he said about this.
I am a physician, and in the government of Jean Chrétien, I was responsible for the Downtown Eastside because of the problem that was happening with overdoses, so I was there from the very beginning.
I look at evidence-based solutions. There are other things that we need to do not so much with respect to this legislation, because the bill must be passed now to get moving on this. We need to do things such as analysis at certain mobile units, at safe injection sites, and in other areas and on the street of whether or not a drug that is being used is tainted with fentanyl or carfentanil. It is because of the safe injection sites in Vancouver that we first found out that there were tainted opioids. We need to do that.
There is a clinic in Vancouver that is giving hydromorphone to a small group of very high-risk addicts. The people who were in the SALOME trials are now getting hydromorphone, which is important for saving their lives and keeping them off street drugs or from buying on the street.
There are some things the minister is working on but this legislation hits the nail right on the head of what we need to do right now.