Madam Speaker, in today's day and age, there are not many Canadians in any part of this country who have not been impacted directly or indirectly by the mental health and addictions crisis we face here in Canada.
Sadly, over the last little while, I have had to be quite aggressive in my frustrations on the topic when we have seen the disaster, the crime, the chaos and the disorder unleashed in the streets of British Columbia. When it came to the poor judgment of the B.C. provincial NDP government to request the federal government to exempt, from the Criminal Code in British Columbia, the consumption and use of hard drugs in public places, it went about as well as one would think it would go.
There were stories of nurses scared to go into work for the fear of meth smoke being blown into their face. There was a nurse who shared a story through the B.C. Nurses' Union, echoing those concerns, who stopped breastfeeding her twin 11-month-old children because she feared that if the meth smoke got into her system, it could affect her children.
We heard stories from Abbotsford about soccer parents, as coaches and volunteers with their kids, who had to scour the fields in advance of their kids playing soccer, in Canada, in 2024, because there were so many syringes and needles laying around their parks. On public transit, people were shooting up and people were smoking hard drugs right on a subway or on a bus, and there was nothing the police could do. Thankfully, the B.C. NDP realized what a disaster that was and asked for the pilot experiment to be pulled back. It took two weeks for the Liberal government to agree.
The most frustrating part is that despite the examples we heard from the B.C. Nurses' Union, despite the stories we heard from soccer clubs and parents and despite the many examples of transit users in B.C. fearing to go to work or to go to school on public transit because of witnessing the consumption of hard drugs right before them, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, the Liberal and NDP government here, collectively in their coalition and even the NDP were openly advocating that this experiment that failed in B.C. be brought to cities like Toronto or Montreal like they have been requesting. With the chaos the Liberals have seen in B.C., with the results they have seen there and with B.C.'s admission of failure by cancelling the exemptions that the Prime Minister granted, the Liberals still will not rule out expanding this to other parts of the country.
We talk about the so-called safe supply. There is no such thing as safe supply. Doing hard drugs is never safe. The government has spent tens of millions of dollars over the course of the last nine years on the so-called safe supply, which the RCMP and multimedia outlets outlined as not actually going anywhere but to drug traffickers, making the situation worse. However, we have very little money, if any, anywhere in the country to fund treatment for an off-ramp to end people's addictions, to provide them support, to provide them treatment and to provide them a change. When will the government get with the program, stop funding its failed radical policies and invest in treatment?