Debates of Dec. 10th, 2018

Opioid Crisis in Canada

[The Deputy Chair, NDP, Carol Hughes]

Before we go to questions and comments, there was an error made. There are points of order that can be accepted. What cannot be accepted are dilatory motions, quorum calls or request for unanimous consent. That said, I would ask the member to apologize for asking people to leave the chamber.

I think that every member has a right to be here and to be heard. The point of order that the member was attempting to make was that it is very difficult to hear when one is wearing the earpiece, especially if one is trying to hear the translation and someone is speaking extremely loudly. Therefore, I would ask the member to apologize for asking people to leave the chamber and to keep in mind that people want to hear what individuals are saying, especially when there is going to be some translation. I think we owe respect to every member to be able to participate and to hear what is said.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Chair, I would encourage all members to stay in the chamber to listen to and participate in the debate. I apologize to the member for suggesting that she leave the chamber.

I will add my further comments as the first questions and answers go through.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Chair, I thank the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader for his speech and passion.

I do understand the nature of the problem in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I was there two weeks ago doing a round table on methamphetamine addiction. Some of the solutions to these addiction issues are similar for the opioid crisis and methamphetamines. People need to be educated that if they try it even once, it can result in an addiction that can ruin their lives.

I had parents of young people in Winnipeg telling me that no treatment is available and that wait times are eight months. Would the member agree that prevention and treatment recovery is needed?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Chair, I agree there is a need. That is why I was so encouraged when Premier Brian Pallister signed an agreement with the federal government that will see millions of dollars flowing for the establishment of beds, which supports my point that Ottawa can be so much more effective if we can get the co-operation and support of other jurisdictions.

Manitoba is not alone. Other provinces have also signed onto this emergency funding that has been made available. I look forward to seeing all provinces ultimately signing on in support of the need for additional beds. I truly believe that the provinces are in a good position to ensure that we maximize the tax dollars being spent on expanding treatment services.

[Cheryl Hardcastle, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Madam Chair, I am thankful for the opportunity to stand to talk about a bogus and disrespectful display by the other side of the House with the previous speaker who was accusing this side of using some drama.

For all of the Canadians watching tonight, if they look back at the Hansard, they will see that the terms “bogus” and “disrespectful” were used to describe what this side of the House was doing when we have simply been passionate and asked to have resources leveraged and a public health emergency declared, which would not have to take very long. Now people are acting as if they are so distracted. We heard gruesome details, as if those are the only details. When we go home to our ridings, we see there is a true crisis happening right now. There is a way for all of us to maximize our resources and work together. We can cut this red tape and can have an immediate response.

There are 11 people a day dying from this. In Windsor and Essex Counties, we have government leaders at all levels watching and understanding how a pan-Canadian strategy could expedite the kind of response we need. That is why we are so incredulous to hear in the House someone swagger, raise their voice and say, “We're allowing a take-note debate tonight and are doing our very best. How dare you?”

How dare we say so? We have a real public health crisis that can be dealt with as an emergency if the government would truly take leadership and do that. To do otherwise is bogus and disrespectful to all of the families suffering today.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Chair, the issue at hand is a very passionate one because people are dying from it and lives are being destroyed. I see animation and yelling on the New Democrat side, and so there is nothing wrong with my also being a little bit passionate about this. What is good for the goose is good for the gander at times. I know sometimes that makes NDP members a little uncomfortable, but the reality is that the NDP is wrong on this issue.

The most significant things the Government of Canada can do is, one, provide financial resources, and two, work with the different stakeholders, in particular our provinces, to ensure that we are maximizing the benefits of the resources going to treatment programs. Our government has already brought in hundreds of millions of dollars and has already signed up, I believe, six provinces. Let us recognize how important our first responders are as a part of the solution.

As much as I raise my voice at times, it is only because, like New Democrats, I also care.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Madam Chair, I cannot take seriously the member's suggestion that the government cannot do any more to save lives. Just for the wannabe minister's records, I'll note that in 2009, 428 people died of the H1N1 virus. Today, with the opioid crisis, over 1,400 people are dying a year in this country, yet we do not have a national health emergency. Why is that?

We heard the NDP critic, the member for Vancouver Kingsway, state very clearly that the government can exercise its right to declare a national health emergency and take immediate action to save lives.

If the Liberals really mean what they say and care deeply about the people whose lives are being lost today, why do they not take action? To suggest there is nothing more the government can do is simply bogus.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Chair, I think the member opposite is being unfair to the NDP governments of British Columbia and Alberta. At the end of the day, as I have indicated, political parties of all stripes govern our provinces. Once all has been said and done, members will find that the greatest resource to ensure that this crisis is dealt with is to place it with our provincial and territorial governments, with the support of Ottawa demonstrating national leadership, which it has done. The government has been working with the provinces and the territories. It has been providing financial resources. It has been working with first-time responders. It is listening to what the stakeholders have said, whether to the current Minister of Health or the previous minister of health.

Many of the concerns that NDP members might want to raise here could also be applied to their provincial counterparts. I would suggest to them not to be too harsh, because I believe that the NDP governments in Alberta and British Columbia are, in fact, working with Ottawa. Like us, they recognize the situation and know it is not going to be resolved overnight. Both levels of government are doing the best they can to ensure that we get the resources and treatment as quickly as possible to those individuals who truly need it.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

Madam Chair, there have been numerous reports that closely link money laundering and the opioid crisis. Could the hon. member for Winnipeg North tell us and my constituents how the government is helping to stop the financing of drugs through money laundering?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Chair, when we look at this crisis, more ministers than just the Minister of Health need to be involved. The Minister of Public Safety is also engaged in it, along with others who have an interest or a vested stake at play here.

There is no doubt there is a very strong criminal element in this crisis. Over the last number of years, we have been working as a government to address that issue also. As I indicated, these terrible drugs have consequences not just for individuals, but also for communities. It is not only the users but also the communities at large that end up paying a significant price.

That is one of the reasons the government is taking a holistic approach when dealing with this crisis. We realize, first, that it takes money and we are committed to providing financial resources. Second, it also means working with the different stakeholders, particularly our provinces and territories.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Chair, I am very pleased to be here tonight to speak on this very important topic. The opioid crisis in Canada is killing more people than homicide, suicide and traffic accidents combined. We have heard the statistics and they are alarming: 8,000 Canadians have died from this crisis and 11 Canadians are dying each day. My feeling is that the actions the government has taken to date are not effective because the numbers continue to increase.

Canada is the number two opioid user. I grew up in a time when we got Tylenol and no one got opioids. We have look seriously at the solutions we need to put in place, so I am going to devote a lot of my time to discussing the kinds of solutions I think the government should be making. It is sad that in the fourth year of its mandate, the problem has continued. Yet the government knew about it from the beginning. It is clear it has absolutely no idea what to do about the problem, so I am going to make some helpful suggestions.

The first suggestion has to do with prevention. We need to prevent fentanyl and carfentanil from getting into the country. Although references were made to the Minister of Public Safety having a plan to increase resources, there is nothing specific. We see, on the other hand, that the United States has negotiated with China to make those substances controlled substances and to work together to prevent those drugs from leaving China and going to the North American continent. We need to do something similar. We need to step up inspection to make sure that these drugs do not come here in the first place.

We also need to work on education. I talk often with youth, who seem very unaware that trying opioids once could kill them because of the contamination we are seeing with fentanyl and carfentanil. In my riding of Sarnia—Lambton, there have been four deaths due to fentanyl-contaminated marijuana. Young people are not being informed about how dangerous it is to try these drugs even once. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons talked about the situation with the methamphetamine crisis. When I toured Winnipeg, I heard stories of people of all ages thinking they were purchasing a drug other than methamphetamine and then becoming addicted. It is so addictive, it is almost impossible to get off it.

There is an addiction problem across the country, and as we look at solutions, we need to make sure we are covering the gamut. The government, unfortunately, decided to legalize marijuana knowing from the experience of other other jurisdictions that there would probably be a 32% increase in the number of people using it. That is what happened in Colorado. Addicts today either started with marijuana or prescription drugs. The health committee heard this in testimony, so we know that the number of people we can expect to become addicted has increased. Depending on the study we look at, 10% to 17% of people who consume marijuana will become addicted to it.

We really need to do something about prevention on the prescription drug side. I do not know how many people watching the debate at home know of kids, for example, having dental surgery and being prescribed 30 and 40 tablets of an opioid. This is totally unacceptable, and it is definitely being over-prescribed. There was a time when opioids were not prescribed at all for dental surgery, so we need to step back and look at prescription practices.

Some efforts have been made across the country to educate doctors so that they will not over-prescribe, but there is more to be done on that because people still have access to and become addicted to these drugs, and then get into an endless cycle of addiction. The government has done a reasonable job of working with first responders in the provinces and territories on naloxone, so that people can be saved from dying from fentanyl and carfentanil. We saw some early deaths there.

Another thing we need to do is to prevent the demand for all of these drugs. The way to do that is by education, but also getting people off of drugs. That is where the Liberal government has really failed. It has failed to put recovery in place. The health committee heard testimony from the Pine River Institute, the only recovery facility in Ontario for young people. There is a wait time of 18 months, which is not an uncommon story. We hear time and again in Ottawa that there are multiple safe injection sites, but no treatment beds are available and there is a six-month wait.

If an addict decides that his or her life has hit rock bottom and wants to get off drugs, he or she cannot get treatment across the country. This is a huge issue. I know that the government has been busy signing onto agreements with the provinces and talking about money that has yet to flow. However, it is year four, and thousands of Canadians are dying. We really have to ramp up the effort to get that put in place and look at other solutions.

Another solution we have not really implemented is looking at pharmacists. They could be the gatekeepers in this whole solution. They can see when someone is being prescribed a large amount of opioids or has a lot of repeats of prescriptions, and if they feel there may be a concern, they could raise a flag. I think there is something to be done there as well.

I have seen some interesting examples of success stories. I went to the two-day symposium on opioids the health minister talked about. There was an example from, I believe, the Blood reserve. At the start, 40% of the people on that reserve were addicted to opioids. There was a nurse practitioner there who took the training for Suboxone treatment to get people off drugs and put everyone who was addicted on the plan, and within a two-year period, they began to see the dosage reduced for many of them. The community came alongside and provided counselling for those who had mental health issues and needed counselling. It provided jobs and job training for those who needed to work. There were rides to school, etc. The results were astounding. There was a reduction in the crime rate of 58%. Emergency calls at the hospital were down about 50% as well. Half the women no longer had their children being removed by children's aid. School attendance was up 33%.

It is a great example of how to get people off drugs by using that program and educating nurse practitioners to do the Suboxone treatment, which is apparently better than methadone treatment, because it is not as hard on the system and on people's teeth. This is a solution that worked and has been proven to work. It should be leveraged across the country, because indigenous people are disproportionately suffering in the opioid crisis, and we need to do something.

We have a number of safe injection sites in Vancouver and Toronto. This is how the lives that are saved are tracked. When someone has to be treated with Suboxone, that counts as a life that has been saved, because the person was going to overdose. However, that same person may come back the next day and the next day and have that same thing happen again. Eventually, he or she will inject somewhere that is not safe and will die. Therefore, this is not the permanent and long-term solution we need. The solution we need is to keep people from getting addicted to drugs in the first place by educating them about the harms and by reducing the supply of drugs. Then we need to help people get treatment and detoxification, which is under provincial jurisdiction, and into recovery. We need a lot more recovery facilities. For them to recover, we are also going to need to up mental health support. This country has a huge gap in the mental health supports that are available and affordable. We need to do something there if we really want to see the crisis averted.

If I had more time, I would go into some of the solutions that have been put in place in other places in the world. I was in Switzerland to see what was done there. It has moved away from supervised injection sites and has trained all its GPs in how to do methadone and Suboxone treatment so that it could increase its treatment capability very quickly without putting bricks and mortar in the ground at great expense and over a huge period of time. That is an idea we should be considering as well. We have heard people talk about the Portugal model. I think there is a lot to learn there.

We have to have a sense of urgency about this crisis. We cannot wait another four years. We have to act. We have to get treatment capability. We have to prevent the drugs from coming into the country and provide education for all.

[John Oliver, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, Lib.]

Madam Chair, I wanted to thank the hon. member for her thoughtful remarks and for her hard work on the health committee as vice-chair and for the great representation she provides at that committee.

There were a number of very thoughtful recommendations brought forward in her address. I want to touch on a few of them. She mentioned border security. I thought she might want to know that more than 42 grams of fentanyl and its analogs, nine million lethal doses, were stopped and seized at the border between April 2016 and September 2016.

In terms of education, we are requiring mandatory labels on all prescription opioids so that people are aware of what they are buying and the risks of what they are buying. We are moving to severely restrict the marketing of opioids to medical professionals and are creating a dedicated team to crack down on offenders.

It has been three years. This has been a problem for about 12 years. The failure to act, in fact the suppression of harm reduction strategies during the Harper government's time, is what we are really dealing with now. We are trying to play catch-up. We have made amazing investments in three years, and we are starting to make a difference. There have been 1,100 overdoses already treated at our safe consumption sites.

Could the member reflect on those lost years and what could be done to try to avoid that happening again?

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Chair, as my mother always said, “You can't change the past, you can only change the future.”

When we look ahead at what we need to do, public education does not just mean labels on a bottle. In places that do it well, like Switzerland and Portugal, they have mandatory education in all schools, from the public system to the high school system. That would be of great use.

We have seen that supervised consumption sites are not solving the problem. We see that people inject again and again and overdose again and again. The answer is that when they come to that moment when they say that this is enough and they need to get their lives back on track, we can get them immediately into treatment and see them recover and get their lives back.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Madam Chair, I agree with my friend that there are not enough treatment facilities. On Vancouver Island, there are no tier-four beds for youth with mental health issues and addictions. In the province of B.C., there is not one tier-five bed. It is a huge problem for us.

We know that over 4,000 Canadians died last year. These preventable deaths have now surpassed the total number of deaths from all public health emergencies in the last 20 years, including SARS, H1N1 and Ebola.

We had an opioid summit in Port Alberni, and we heard from our medical health officers. They said that they believe that addiction should be treated as a health issue, not criminalized. Talking to RCMP officers, they say that we are not going to arrest our way out of this problem. We have to take a different approach.

At the association of Vancouver Island municipalities, we heard from all four medical health officers, and they all agreed on one thing. They wanted to see us take the Portugal model and decriminalize all drugs.

Does my colleague agree that if the Liberal government was really listening to our medical health officers who are dealing with this issue on the ground, it would look at treatment and decriminalization and a holistic approach, as Portugal has done? It had the highest number of overdose deaths in the EU, and now it has the lowest.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Chair, it is important, when we look at the Portugal model, to understand what was done there and what the order of operations was.

It put in place mandatory public education, and it had 170 treatment and recovery centres for 11 million people. It has a truly universal health care system, where mental health is covered, so everyone can afford to get it.

When it decriminalized, it did not come without any penalties. People get a hearing with a panel of a medical specialist, a legal specialist and a psychologist, who impose sanctions. The panel may let people off if it is their first time, but if people continue to have issues and are health care workers, it can sanction them so they cannot work. It can send people to therapy if they need it or to treatment and recovery centres. Portugal has those things in place. Those are the things that are missing that we need to work on and progress toward in Canada.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Madam Chair, I disagree with some of the member's comments, particularly in relation to gateway drugs. A special Senate committee in 2001 debunked a lot of that.

I want to focus on what we agree on. The member said that there has been a lot of positive work done in Portugal and in Switzerland. We know that in Switzerland, they provide a clean and regulated supply of drugs to those addicted. In Portugal, they take a health-focused approach.

I want to ask not about decriminalization but about the idea of the people we want to help. Forget traffickers and forget producers. If we want to treat patients as patients and not as criminals, does the member think we can move out of criminal courts for people with small possession of all drugs and move toward health-focused panels made up of medical health practitioners and social workers, a proposal supported by the Canadian Mental Health Association? I know she has spoken very positively about attacking mental health issues.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Chair, we cannot move to that step until we have these other elements in place. We in Canada have huge gaps in mental health support, so people cannot afford to get the help they need. We do not have the treatment and recovery infrastructure we need. We have not done the innovative things, like training family physicians, who are actually better positioned to help treat people because they have a relationship with their patients. There are a lot of steps I would like to see us take in that direction.

[Alex Nuttall, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Madam Chair, I certainly want to thank the member for all the work she continues to do on this file to ensure that it is brought up day in and day out.

One of the things that was just asked was about the Portugal model. We need to go a little deeper. Could the member perhaps show a comparison between what the government did in Portugal in terms of the rehabilitation centres and what we are seeing happening here in Canada? If we can learn from Portugal, we should understand where we are and where we need to get to.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Chair, it is an excellent question. Portugal had 170 treatment and recovery centres, and they were multi-bed, with 100 plus beds each, for 11 million people. If we think about Canada, with 36 million people, and the number of treatment centres we would have to have in place, that is a huge difference from what we see today. We have essentially just a handful in each province. A huge amount of money would be needed to put bricks and mortar on the ground.

There may be ways of getting that recovery capability without bricks and mortar by using nurse practitioners, in the example I cited, by using family physicians and training them up, and by putting in communities public education to prevent people from going down that dark path in the first place.

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

Madam Chair, rehabilitation and treatment are one thing, but getting the person to that point is another.

In the meantime, something needs to be done, because people are still dying. Two young women died in my riding last week. We could be doing something to stop these things from happening.

Declaring a state of emergency would give us plenty of tools we could use to prevent deaths. Last summer, naloxone kits, which help slow the effects of an overdose, were not available in my riding, and there were seven overdoses. The organization Dopamine ended up having to call a pharmacy to order them. Steps should be taken to make naloxone kits available. Sometimes, the drug is so powerful that a single kit may not even be enough.

In light of all this, does the member not think there are some very practical steps we could be taking to save lives?

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Chair, the member brings up a very good point. There were shortages of naloxone. There are chronic drug shortages under the current Liberal government. The Liberals need to get a plan to address that. Their plan of having a website where they list them is not helpful at all.

Specifically with respect to the opioid crisis, we know that the number of deaths is increasing, and we know that people who are at supervised consumption sites are overdosing multiple times. Therefore, we need to have those kits in supply. We need to have backup suppliers, which is chronically a problem for the government, and we need to make sure that gets in place quickly.

[John Oliver, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, Lib.]

Madam Chair, the opioid overdose crisis in Canada is a public health crisis of the highest priority. Our government is committed to taking an evidence-based, comprehensive public health approach to save lives, reduce harms and provide treatment and other support to people who use drugs.

We are taking action through the Canadian drugs and substances strategy, the federal government's approach to drug and substance use, which was first announced in December 2016. The Canadian drugs and substances strategy reflects a health focused approach to drug policy, is grounded in evidence-based decision-making and includes harm reduction as a key pillar, alongside prevention, treatment and enforcement.

Tonight, my comments will highlight some of the evidence-based harm reduction measures we are taking under the strategy to address the opioid crisis. In particular, I will outline the importance of supervised consumption sites as evidence-based interventions and key components of our emergency response. Finally, I will highlight a number of other innovative approaches that have been undertaken to help reduce harms from problematic opioid use in Canada.

There is a growing consensus in Canada that problematic substance use is a health issue that requires a public health response. As such, the Canadian drugs and substances strategy is a comprehensive, collaborative and compassionate approach to drug policy and uses a public health lens when addressing substance use issues. Harm reduction aims to improve the health and well-being of people who use drugs, while at the same time helping them to make connections with important health and social services, including treatment providers.

In addition to existing funding, in budget 2017, our government announced an additional investment of $100 million over five years and $22.7 million ongoing to support the Canadian drugs and substances strategy. That includes $30 million over five years for the harm reduction fund for community based initiatives to support needle exchange and other critical evidence-based harm reduction measures to help reduce rates of hepatitis C and HIV from sharing of drug use equipment.

I would now like to move specifically to our government's support for supervised consumption sites under the Canadian drugs and substances strategy.

In May 2017, the federal government streamlined the application process to establish supervised consumption sites to help support their establishment in the communities they were needed in. As of early December 2018, there are 28 operating supervised consumption sites across the country, working day in and day out to help save lives.

International and Canadian evidence has shown that supervised consumption sites are an effective harm reduction measure. When properly established and maintained, these sites have health and social benefits for individuals and the community at large, without discernible negative impacts on public health or safety.

Supervised consumption sites reduce the transmission of communicable diseases, decrease infections, reduce emergency room use and hospital admissions related to injection drug use and decrease overdose deaths. In addition, supervised consumption sites provide access to other health and social services for people who use drugs, including opportunities to pursue drug treatment programs for those who are ready.

Data reported to Health Canada also shows that over the last 18 months supervised consumption sites in Canada have had over 125,000 visits and over 1,100 reported overdoses on site without a single death. In addition, these sites distributed over 2,600 naloxone kits, helping to get this life-saving medication into the hands of the people who needed it.

Cost-benefit studies demonstrate that by reducing behaviours like needle sharing and by preventing overdose deaths, supervised consumption sites result in savings to the health care system that far outweigh the costs of their operation.

Recognizing the need for rapid access to front-line services, the federal government has also facilitated the establishment of temporary overdose prevention sites. Overdose prevention sites provide short-term harm reduction services and operate on the basis of a class exemption provided by the federal government under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, and are authorized to address an urgent public health need related to drug overdoses.

We also know that while harm reduction measures are vital, a number of other critical interventions are required. For example, a range of evidence-based treatment options need to be easily and readily accessible for those who are ready to seek treatment services.

In terms of treatment for problematic substance use, our government has committed $150 million for an emergency treatment fund to help improve the availability of treatment options in Canada. In addition, our government has made a number of investments in recent federal budgets to support expanded mental health and drug treatment services in first nations and Inuit communities, including $200 million over five years and $40 million ongoing provided in budget 2018.

Our government is also committed to exploring new and innovative approaches to address the opioid crisis to help reduce harms from problematic substance use. We continue to lose lives to drug overdoses every day and we need to explore new and promising approaches.

That is why in November 2017, Canada began allowing drug checking services to be performed at supervised consumption sites that wished to offer that service. Drug checking allows people who use drugs to make informed choices by having additional information on what may be in their drugs, including the presence of highly toxic substances like fentanyl that are driving the overdose crisis we are currently seeing in Canada.

We have made naloxone, a drug used to temporarily reverse an opioid overdose, available without prescription in Canada. We have passed the Good Samaritan Drug Overdose Act that encourages people to seek help in the event of an overdose by providing some legal protection for those who experience or witness an overdose.

Another key component to harm reduction is addressing stigma toward people who use drugs. For people who use substances, stigma can have many negative effects, including feelings of isolation and helplessness; discriminatory treatment by society; and the creation of barriers to accessing quality health care or social services that other Canadians enjoy freely. Our government is committed to reducing stigma toward people who use drugs and will be rolling out a campaign in early 2019 to help inform the public about stigma and what people can do to help reduce it.

Our government remains committed to doing everything it can to reduce overdoses and to save lives. To do this, we will continue to work closely with provincial and territorial counterparts, with people with lived and living experience with drug use and other stakeholders to help ensure that evidence-based harm reduction services are available for Canadians that want them and need them.

The evidence is clear that harm reduction works to help protect people who use drugs from overdose deaths, improve their health and well-being and connect them to other important services like treatment, housing, training and other important social supports. There is no trade-off between harm reduction and other interventions like treatment or prevention. They work best when they work together in a combined way.

Our government is committed to addressing this crisis in a way that is collaborative, comprehensive, compassionate and evidence-based.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Madam Chair, I would like to thank my hon. colleague for his thoughtful work on health committee.

The president of the Canadian Medical Association is calling on Canadian politicians to have an open and courageous debate about decriminalizing opioids in the face of the overdose crisis.

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has struck a special committee to study decriminalizing or legalizing illicit drugs in response to the opioid crisis.

Toronto's Chief Medical Officer Dr. Eileen de Villa is calling for the decriminalization and the potential legalization of all drugs for personal use as a way to curb opioid-related deaths.

I could go on and on.

Every stakeholder who has come before health committee and who works in the field of addiction says the same thing. The reason people are dying by the thousands in Canada is because they are being poisoned by a street level, tainted drug supply.

All things being equal, if we could do one thing and ensure those people have access to the health system to clean sources of drugs of known dosage and known origin, at least we could stop those people from dying.

Does my hon. colleague disagree with that and those stakeholders? Could he maybe explain why, if he does feel this way, he is opposed to at least studying the decriminalization of drugs as a way of dealing with these deaths?

[John Oliver]

Madam Chair, I thank my hon. colleague for his work on health committee and for the efforts he is making to address this problem in a proactive way.

As I said earlier, decriminalization would not ensure a safe drug supply. It means that if one is found with drugs, the individual would not be charged criminally, but it would not ensure a safe drug supply. It would not solve the stigma problem that is a barrier to people seeking treatment. Decriminalization would not boost access to treatment centres. As I referenced earlier, Portugal's former head of drug policy has said that decriminalization is not a silver bullet to solve the crisis.

We need to start on the basics, so that is what we are doing. W are responding by restoring harm reduction. We have opened over two dozen supervised consumption sites. We have invested over $200 million in treatment centres. We are fast-tracking regulatory action to cut red tape.

We are all on the same page on this one. We need to ensure that Canadians, when they are ready to seek treatment, have access to treatment.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Chair, my question for the member is this. This is a huge priority. We see the Prime Minister tweeting out $50 million here and there. There have been $250 million pledged to the opioid crisis, but probably only $50 million has been spent to date. Will the government increase its funding to address this crisis?