Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to table a petition on behalf of my constituents from Courtney, in the Comox Valley. They are calling on the government to address the opioid crisis. With over 4,000 Canadians dying in 2017 due to preventable opioid overdose and fentanyl poisoning, this is more deaths than any other public health emergency in the last 20 years, including SARS, H1N1 and Ebola. The petitioners are calling on the Government of Canada to declare the current opioid crisis and the fentanyl poisoning crisis a national public health emergency under the Emergencies Act; to reform drug policy to decriminalize personal possession; and to create with urgency and immediacy a system to provide safe, unadulterated access to substances so that people who use substances experimentally, recreationally or chronically are not at imminent risk of overdose due to a contaminated source. They are also calling on the government to adopt models based on the Portugal model, where they had only 40 overdose deaths in 2017.
In the House of Commons on September 26th, 2018. See this statement in context.