Madam Chair, under our federal legislation it is possible for a community to apply for a supervised injection site, but that takes a lot of paperwork and a lot of time. The New Democrats urged the government when it was first elected to change the Conservative legislation to make that happen more quickly and it has happened. There are more supervised injection sites in this country than there were before, but that is not enough.
We need overdose prevention sites to pop up in every community across the country because we cannot wait. We cannot wait another two years for a single supervised injection site to maybe open up in a particular community. We need these overdose prevention sites now and we need treatment facilities now.
The overdose prevention site in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver is operating illegally right now with no federal money. Brave people go to work every day and risk their professional licences in order to save lives. All it would take is the stroke of a pen by the Liberal government under the Emergencies Act to render that overdose prevention site legal and allow sites to proliferate across the country, but the government refuses to do it.
Worse still, the government is misleading Canadians by saying it has no powers under the Emergencies Act that would allow it to do anything more than what it is doing now. That is patently false. Any Canadian can read section 8 of the Emergencies Act and see for themselves, and ask the Liberals why they are refusing to exercise that power.
If the Liberals truly believe this is an emergency and they truly want to save lives, they should be doing it now. A New Democrat government would.