Madam Speaker, I am back tonight to continue to raise the alarm on the impacts of the poisoned drug crisis on my community and, specifically tonight, on the federal funds that are needed to act. The reality is that, in my community, this crisis continues to have devastating impacts. This year alone, there were 72 more deaths from poisoned drugs. In fact, just in the period from October 11 to October 21, earlier this month, there were five more suspected poisoned drug deaths, each one a loved member of my community, such as Alby, who I spoke about in the House recently, or my friend Hudeyfa, who passed away earlier this year. Every single one was a preventable death.
In the midst of this crisis, the federal government has a program specifically for prevention, harm reduction and treatment initiatives. It is called the substance use and addictions program, or SUAP for short. It is a $359-million program. There is good news for the government: We have two experienced, credible organizations who applied for this very fund from Waterloo region, Sanguen and Community Healthcaring.
Sanguen has even been funded by SUAP before. I was thrilled to join the then minister of mental health and addictions, our former colleague Carolyn Bennett, alongside my colleague from Kitchener—Conestoga last year, to announce a previous extension of SUAP funding for Sanguen's community health van, yet this year, for both applications from Waterloo region, neither one was successful, meaning that zero SUAP dollars are going to Waterloo region.
Even if we received just the average across the country, in recent years program funding varied between $104 million to $145 million a year. If we were to average that out across the five ridings across Waterloo region, it would mean between $1.5 million to $2 million.
This is at a time when we need more of everything in the face of this poisoned drug crisis: more treatment, more mental health supports, more safe consumption sites, more safer supply and more harm reduction. Instead, both provincially and now federally as well, our community is actually getting less. This is why I met with the minister and her team when we began to hear news of these funding decisions back in July.
The best they can do is talk about a new fund being set up that non-profits and charities in my community, and others across the country, will not even be eligible for, with a hope that more money might get announced in the future. That means that organizations such as Sanguen and Community Healthcaring are going to have to begin to wind down programs by March 31 of next year if nothing more is done, at a time when we need them doing more.
The other reality, though, is that, beyond those two organizations, what we need is SUAP money, not words of aspiration, to be delivered to communities like mine.
Will the minister commit to reviewing these SUAP decisions to ensure that hot spots such as Waterloo region are not overlooked?