Mr. Speaker, the Liberals are selling these injection sites and billing them as a way to reintroduce health care and treatment for addicts. However, voting against the Senate amendment to offer a legal alternative to addicts goes against basic standards for delivering health care.
Liberals are not telling Canadians that addicts show up not with legal substances but actually with illegal substances made in basements. They are poisons made by criminal organizations. This puts addicts in danger and the public in danger.
If Liberals really want to help addicts start on the road to recovery, they should be offering addicts a legal alternative to these illegal substances. This would help develop a medical relationship between addicts and clinics instead of between addicts and drug dealers.
Addicts would not have to commit crimes and would not have to worry about overdoses from illegal poisons being shot into their arms. The public would not have to worry about being victims of crimes committed by addicts to support their habit.
This Senate amendment would place the options for care between addicts and a medical practitioner, not between addicts and their dealers.
Addicts who present to these clinics are desperate for help, and they should be offered a legal, safer standard of care, not a dangerous criminally produced poison. Why will the Liberals not offer addicts the same standard of care and legal alternatives as other Canadians who have treatable conditions?