Mr. Chair, from the years of 2006 to 2014, I was the manager of a Twin Cities Minor Tackle Football Association team. My good friend Jody Brown was the head coach and his son Jody Jr. played on our team, while his other son Tyshawn watched from the sidelines and played with his friends and the siblings of other players on the team. In later years, he too would play.
Football, like any other sport, provides children an outlet. It also teaches values and life skills. It teaches them about community, dedication and teamwork. It provides them love and support, as truly one can never really have too much of either. It provides them structure. It gives them a sense of belonging. It sure did for me, and I was just holding the clipboard.
Tyshawn gets along with other kids and with adults fairly easily. However, there was one friend with whom Tyshawn played on the same football team and basketball team during grades five and six. Being part of these teams strengthened their friendship. Though I was not on the team, I was not the manager, I supported these teams often by going to watch and cheering from the sidelines. These kids are part of our community and they are part of my family.
Tyshawn's friend's name was Zion. In May 2017, at the age of 14, Zion died of an overdose. I share this because Zion is always on my mind. I share this because I know there are many people in this place, in my community and across Canada whose minds are with people, often in their own back yard, who have been lost to overdose.
With over 8,000 overdose deaths in Canada from January 2016 to March 2018, it is hard to imagine that anyone has not been touched by the overdose crisis in some way. Opioid-related deaths are now the highest cause of death in working-age Canadians. The overdose crisis has affected all our communities. It has certainly affected mine. In Waterloo region, we lost Zion and 84 other precious lives to overdose in 2017. All of those people were loved and valued, but we did not do enough to save their lives.
This is not a partisan issue. Across Canada, communities are trying to find ways to address the overdose crisis to save their community members. We know there are many effective strategies to reducing the number of overdose deaths, because we have consulted health professionals, policy experts and directly with people who use drugs. Consultation works.
We know that supervised consumption services and overdose prevention sites work. We know that greater access to housing and mental health support work. We know that increasing access to naloxone and naloxone training works. We know that working with police officers and paramedics to better serve people who use drugs, so people are not afraid to call for help when someone overdoses, that works. We know that lifting restrictions on options available to physicians to provide prescriptions for methadone, suboxone and opioid agonist therapy works. We know also that we need to be having serious conversations about decriminalizing people who use drugs. We have so many tools at our disposal. We have so many ways to support people who are at risk because of the toxic illicit drug supply.
However, one barrier I continue to see that has so saturated our society and that has caused communities to be paralyzed in their response to the overdose crisis is the stigma we continue to place on people who use drugs. This year, the Canadian Mental Health Association Waterloo Wellington joined organizations across the country in observing National Addictions Awareness Week, from November 26 to December 2. Education and awareness are key components in dispelling stereotypes and reducing the stigma associated with addictions and recovery.
According to innovative thinker, physician and author, Dr. Gabor Maté, pain is complex. He writes:
We don’t explain how physical pain is often a result of a combination of both physical and emotional factors. We don’t learn how to speak to people with pain and how to listen to them. We don’t learn about the roots of chronic physical pain and chronic emotional pain that often lies in childhood experience.
Dr. Maté offers a view that counters the black and white notions of addiction being either a genetic disease or an individual moral failure. He says, “The question is not why the addiction, but why the pain.” He takes a trauma-informed approach to addictions that views poverty, isolation and painful childhood traumatic experiences as a major risk factor for developing addictions.
I know these are tough conversations. I know these are needed tough, challenging conversations that we must have today. My colleagues from the Waterloo region, namely, the members of Parliament for Kitchener Centre, Kitchener South—Hespeler and Cambridge, know this hits home. This issue is in our backyards. The Record, a Waterloo region newspaper, reports that in 2017, Waterloo Regional Police seized over 4,000 grams of fentanyl and carfentanil. By September of this year, they had already seized more than 9,000 grams of these drugs.
I know this is an issue that is of deep concern to all of us on both sides of the House. I thank all of my colleagues for being here this evening to participate in this take-note debate and to express their passionate views. I thank those who have been affected by the crisis and yet bravely share their stories to help others. I thank people on the front lines who work with governments and organizations to find a better way forward. I thank the first responders who do their best to save lives and help families.
As we debate this issue and look forward to solutions, I invite everyone to dig deep, to challenge the deeply ingrained stereotypes that we hold about drugs and the people who use them. We cannot work our way out of this crisis until we take responsibility for the ways that our laws, policies and institutions traumatize people, and disproportionately those who are already marginalized because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, poverty and histories of colonization. We need to look at ways in which our own communities are perpetuating this traumatization, thus putting people in our communities at greater risk of overdose.
I do not want to hear any more this old refrain of “not in my backyard”. This problem is in our backyard, so the solution needs to be there too.