Madam Speaker, I would be pleased to rise in the House today rather than just speak to a pinhole camera, as I always say, but let me say that New Democrats will be supporting Bill C-22 at second reading, because there are some good ideas in it. However, if we are going to be amending the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, we see Bill C-22 as a real missed opportunity. We have two very important crises in front of us as Canadians. One is the opioid crisis and the other is the over-incarceration of indigenous people, Black Canadians and Canadians living in poverty. We had a real chance to tackle both of those issues in this bill and, instead, the government has given us a very tepid response.
What we should see in this bill is a change to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to decriminalize the personal possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use, and we should also see a second provision that would automatically expunge previous criminal records for personal possession of drugs. If we had those two things in this bill, we could tackle the problem of addiction by moving it clearly to the health system rather than the criminal justice system, and we could tackle one of the main causes of over-incarceration of marginalized people in Canada.
The policies that New Democrats are talking about are more effective, more just and even cheaper. I want to talk about mandatory minimums. The one good idea in the bill is to eliminate mandatory minimums for drug offences. New Democrats have certainly long argued for this. Conservatives, in their speeches, have been saying that the bill would eliminate mandatory minimums created by the Liberals, which is true and I am for that, and it creates a lot more mandatory minimums created by Conservatives, and I am also in favour of that.
Mandatory minimums do not do a thing to prevent or deter crime or make Canadians safer. All that mandatory minimums do is to guarantee that some people who should not be in prison at all, who would be better off in rehabilitation or diversion programs, are incarcerated. Mandatory minimums end up costing the public money, and having spent 20 years as a criminal justice instructor before coming here, I can say that those who go to prison actually end up far more likely to reoffend than those who do not. Therefore, rehabilitation and diversion programs are a great success and mandatory minimums stand in the way of those programs.
When it comes to overrepresentation, there is no doubt that when we look at the statistics of how many indigenous people are in the correctional system, though they are only 4.9% of the population, they make up over 30% of the people incarcerated in Canada, as the criminal investigator, Ivan Zinger, reported. If we look at Black Canadians, in the last census though they were about 3.5% of Canadians, they are more than double that percentage of the prison population. Many people who live in poverty end up embroiled in the criminal justice system because of very minor drug offences. Again, if we are looking at what the real solution is to both of these problems, it is decriminalization of the personal possession of small amounts of drugs.
Let us take the example of Portugal, which decriminalized personal possession in 2001. We see some very positive results as a result of that legislative action. There have been steep declines in overdose deaths in Portugal, in drug usage, in new cases of HIV and hepatitis C infections and in drug-related crime. Overdose deaths declined from over 400 per year to less than 40. Drug usage declined among all age groups, but it was an especially large decline in the 15-year-old to 24-year-old age group. New HIV infections declined by 90%. Portugal previously had the highest rate of drug-related HIV cases, and decriminalization led to that very steep decrease. It also led to a decrease in incarceration, by about 75% for drug offences.
This measure had lots of related impacts. First of all, the police reported that they had much more time to devote to serious drug trafficking cases when they were not messing with personal possession cases, and it helped eliminate many long delays in the Portuguese criminal justice system by taking many of these minor cases out of the court system.
Did it solve all problems related to addiction and drug use? No, of course it did not. Observers have pointed to the need that if we decriminalize personal possession, we need strong prevention and treatment programs to go alongside that. We need things like supervised injection sites, needle exchanges, provisions for the safe supply of drugs, better access to anti-overdose medications and improved access, obviously, to drug prevention and treatment programs.
Certainly the opioid crisis makes more dramatic action than this bill offers necessary. On the south island, in 2019, there were 65 overdose deaths. In 2020, during the current pandemic crisis, there 120 deaths. In British Columbia as a whole in the period of COVID, the number of toxic-drug deaths doubled in that time period.
Is decriminalization of the possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use still an idea outside the mainstream? Certainly I felt like an outlier when I first began talking about this as a city councillor in 2008, though, of course, Portugal was my example then as it is now. However, now we can add to the list of supporters of decriminalization of personal possession, including big city mayors, from Kennedy Stewart in Vancouver to Valérie Plante in Montreal; the Elizabeth Fry Society; the John Howard Society; virtually every criminal justice researcher; the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police; the World Health Organization; the Global Commission on Drug Policy; and various UN agencies.
While the New Democrats are offering support for this timid bill, it does do one good thing in eliminating those mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences. However, what we are offering is also criticism for the failure to take on the bigger questions that lie behind our failure to confront the opioid crisis, the over-incarceration of indigenous people, Black Canadians and Canadians living in poverty.
The New Democrats will continue to fight for more effective, comprehensive and cheaper measures to get these two jobs done.