Mr. Chair, it was a crisis at the time 417 people died in one year in the Downtown Eastside. That crisis moved three different political parties and three different levels of government to decide that we were going to do whatever we needed to do, that we were going to put aside our differences, arguments and historic battles to get it done. At the time, we were able to create a safe injection site, which was a pilot project, for two years. We put a bubble zone around a spot in the Downtown Eastside where people could bring in these drugs and inject them themselves.
I had travelled to Switzerland, as had the mayor of Vancouver, and we saw this being done with great success. As I said before, we need to look at the model in Switzerland, where it has found a way, without decriminalizing or legalizing drugs, to get a safe source of drugs for people so they do not have to buy them on the street.