Mr. Speaker, it is with great pleasure that I rise in this House today to speak in support of Bill S-248, an act respecting national physicians’ day. This bill would designate May 1 as national physicians' day across Canada.
I appreciate and find it fitting that May 1 is also the birthday of the first woman selected to practise medicine in Canada, Dr. Emily Stowe.
As the member of Parliament for Vancouver East and someone who has been an elected representative at all three levels of government in Vancouver, I know just how important is the work and leadership of doctors in my riding, across Vancouver, throughout British Columbia and across the country.
Let me address an urgent health issue that is gripping communities across the country. As we know, Canada is dealing with a national opioid crisis, and the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver is the epicentre. While the government has been slow to act on this crisis and continues to refuse to declare a national health emergency, doctors in B.C. have been showing leadership on this issue for years.
Dr. Bonnie Henry was appointed B.C.'s provincial health officer in 2018. She is B.C.'s first female provincial medical health officer. Last month, Dr. Henry spoke to the CBC to reflect on it being three years since the previous provincial health officer, Dr. Perry Kendall, declared a public health emergency in response to the opioid-related overdose deaths in British Columbia. When asked about policy changes that have helped, she cited great strides in changing naloxone from a prescription-only drug to something available over the counter to it now being available and free everywhere. She also stated that:
...one of the other really important things is we've been able to change the public discourse about people who use drugs and about addictions. People understand that these [people] are our community. It's not just "those others."
Dr. Henry, in an earlier statement, also called for more and bolder actions to continue improving the situation and taking concrete steps to end this national health emergency. She stated:
We need options to provide people at risk of overdose with low-barrier access to a regulated supply of opioids, and we need to connect people who use drugs with the supports they need rather than sending them to the criminal...system.
In fact, she went on to call for the decriminalization of all drugs. She made it clear that a safe supply and the treatment of addictions is a health issue, not a criminal issue. Her work is a continuation of that of her predecessor, Dr. Perry Kendall.
Dr. Kendall recently retired as a long-time advocate for harm reduction. He has been one of B.C.'s most outspoken voices on the ongoing opioid overdose crisis. He led the way in our country and declared the situation a public health emergency in 2016 in B.C. Dr. Perry Kendall was there when the first supervised injection site in North America opened in Vancouver. Since that day, he has continued to ensure the discussion about the safe site is evidence-based. Dr. Perry Kendall is not alone in this effort.
Dr. Mark Tyndall, formerly with the BC Centre for Disease Control, has been a vocal advocate for addressing the opioid crisis. He was the lead of research and evaluation for the PHSA Opioid Overdose Response Team and was co-lead investigator on the evaluation of Insite, North America's first supervised injection facility. While he has recently left the organization, he continues to be a leading voice on this important issue.
Then there is Dr. Julio Montaner. He was the leading physician on the North American opiate medication initiative, known as NAOMI, and the study to assess longer-term opioid medication effectiveness, SALOME. These clinical trials were instrumental in saving lives, and his research was pivotal in the 2011 Supreme Court decision against the Harper Conservative government to shut down Insite.
There is also Dr. Patricia Daly, the chief medical officer at Vancouver Coastal Health. Like those mentioned, she and her predecessors at VCH have been showing true leadership on this crisis. In January of this year, she issued an update on the overdose crisis. This update concluded with four recommendations moving forward: establish a system of care for people with addictions to implement treatment standards and monitor outcomes; expand access and remove barriers to opioid agonist therapy; establish a safe, regulated supply of drugs; and expand programs that can prevent addiction, which focus on vulnerable youth, indigenous peoples and people living with physical pain.
It is clear there remains much work to be done in Vancouver, throughout British Columbia and across Canada to truly end the opioid crisis we are facing.
From January 2016 to September 2018, there were more than 10,300 lives lost in opioid-related deaths in Canada. Ninety-three per cent of these deaths were considered accidental or unintentional. From January to September 2018, there were 3,286 deaths with 1,155 of them occurring in B.C. Seventy-one per cent of those deaths were attributed to fentanyl.
Thanks to the doctors I have mentioned and the many others I do not have time to name, we have started to see a reduction in deaths. We also know that without their work, advocacy and leadership, our communities would have lost thousands more of our loved ones.
We as elected officials must take their advice seriously. We must act. Lives are at stake. The work of these doctors and countless others has helped provide other front-line service providers with the tools and information to help reduce the devastation of this crisis.
While this bill is about recognizing National Physicians' Day, I feel that given the work that physicians do and its far-reaching impacts, it is also important to recognize who their work supports and who supports their work. That is the front-line doctors, nurses, first responders and community service providers such as Sarah Blyth at the OPS, working tirelessly day in and day out to save lives.
Backing up the work of physicians are public health policy-makers. I would like to highlight the work of Dr. Steve Morgan, director of the UBC Centre for Health Services and Policy Research. Dr. Morgan and his team at Pharmacare 2020, including Dr. Danielle Martin, MD; Dr. Marc-Andre Gagnon; Dr. Barbara Mintzes; Dr. Jamie Daw; and Dr. Joel Lexchin, MD, have shown us clearly that the best path forward for Canadians is a public universal pharmacare plan. Their research leaves no doubt. They state:
Evidence from across Canada and around the world shows that Pharmacare is the best system for achieving:
universal access to necessary medicines
fair distribution of prescription drug costs
safe and appropriate prescribing, and
maximum health benefits per dollar spent.
This report explains why this is the case and therefore why Canadians deserve Pharmacare by 2020.
Even under conservative estimates by the Parliamentary Budget Office, had a program like this been in place in 2015, Canadians would have seen savings of over $4 billion. Physicians across Canada know all too well about the barriers high prescription drug costs have on their patients.
According to a 2018 Canadian Medical Association survey, 46% of physicians said patients without drug coverage were not filling their prescriptions.
I have heard far too many heartbreaking stories. It is time for the government to act. I believe that we must match our words with actions. That means recognizing the strain we put on doctors by failing to eliminate the barriers that patients have in accessing the treatment regimes they prescribe. That means investing in harm reduction. That means a universal pharmacare program.
We can all do this. We should recognize and thank doctors for their work, but equally important, let us make policies and take action to realize what the doctors hope to achieve for all Canadians.