Madam Speaker, we have now lost 47,162 people to a poisoned drug supply. That is between January 2016 and May 2024. That is more people than we lost in World War II, yet we are not seeing a war-type effort to save lives in this country and to fight this crisis.
We have heard from the experts: the First Nations Health Authority; the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police; the chief medical health officers of both British Columbia and Ontario; the chief coroners of Alberta, B.C. and Ontario, the provinces where the highest number of deaths are happening; the Canadian Expert Task Force on Substance Use, which was made up of a wide spectrum, including law enforcement; Moms Stop The Harm; and the Canadian Mental Health Association.
They have been consistent and unanimous in saying we need to stop criminalizing people who use substances; we need to replace the toxic street supply with a safer supply of drug replacement therapy; we need to have treatment on demand, no-wait treatment and no-wait stabilization beds, so when people want help, they get help; and we need to invest heavily in recovery and prevention focused on our youth and, of course, in enforcement, so law enforcement can go after the manufacturers of the substances and those trafficking, especially those at the high levels. Most importantly, all of them have said we need to treat this crisis like the emergency it is.
The government has spent less than 1% responding to this crisis than it did on COVID-19. Why? It is because of stigma. We know who is dying. It is mainly men. Those living in my home province are 5.9 times more likely to die if they are first nations; in Alberta, it is eight times higher. The Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, in my riding, just declared a state of emergency. It is losing so many members. The Ahousaht First Nation has lost over 100 members because of the mental health and substance use crisis just in the last few years. I know many of them. It is very painful to see what is happening. Also, the big-city mayors have been calling for help. They are saying that not enough resources are being applied to respond to this.
We have seen countries do this. Portugal saw a 77% drop in chronic daily users because it got the politicians out of the way. That is what we need to do. We need to support the experts with evidence-based policy and provide the resources. The government put forward its drug strategy, and it is great. It uses the same language we see in Portugal, a compassionate, coordinated, integrated plan, but guess what it is missing. There is no timeline, and there are no resources, regarding how it is going to respond to the crisis.
The government had an auto theft summit. I am not saying that is not an important issue, but it has still not had a summit on the toxic drug crisis. In the substance use assistance program on Vancouver Island, only one riding, Victoria, got funding. Everybody else was shut out. There are first nations that needed that money. Greater Waterloo region, as my colleague was saying, got nothing.
We need action. We need the government to treat this with the war effort that it requires. Nobody is not feeling this right now. No community is being left. This is what I would call an emergency, and the government is not treating it like that.