Madam Chair, I thank the member for his speech and for the stories that he shared.
I want to ask the member about accountability for some of the companies that have been responsible for in some ways causing and certainly fuelling the opioid crisis. There has been a lot of litigation in the United States targeting Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, as well as McKinsey, and they have been forced to pay significant amounts of money that have been able to be used towards compensation for victims as well as treatment.
My sense is that in Canada we have been far behind in terms of the government trying to hold some of these corporate bad actors accountable for fuelling the opioid crisis and for pushing misinformation about the addiction risk associated with opioids. As one of the stories the member shared shows, most of the people who struggle with substance abuse disorders in the context of opioids started with prescription opioids, and for many people that was at a time when there was a great deal of misinformation that was aggressively and pointedly pushed by some of these companies about the risks.
I would ask the member this: Why is the government not doing more, and should the government do more to hold these actors—Purdue, the Sackler family and McKinsey—accountable?