Mr. Speaker, I wish my first intervention in the House on behalf of the people of Nanaimo—Ladysmith were under better circumstances, but our community is in crisis.
In 2024, Nanaimo lost 94 people to overdoses, more than three times the number in 2016, when the B.C. government declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency. Families are grieving. Neighbourhoods feel the weight of this tragedy. The safe-supply experiment has failed. People are suffering. Crime is up. It has truly been a lost decade.
Conservatives know that it is time to invest in treatment, to recriminalize hard drugs like fentanyl and to provide real mental health supports, not taxpayer-funded drugs that fuel addiction. It is time for common-sense solutions that restore hope and bring our loved ones home drug-free.