Mr. Speaker, the government promised that its approach to addiction would reduce harm and lead people toward recovery, but the evidence shows that this promise has not been kept. Canadians were told that decriminalization, safer supply and supervised consumption would reduce harm and connect people to treatment. That was the promise. However, the reality on the ground tells a completely different story.
At the health committee, witnesses made it clear that overdose rates have not come down in any meaningful way. Communities are still suffering. Families are grieving. First responders are still overwhelmed. In many places, public spaces that should be safe for children and families are now sites of open drug use, chaos and fear.
In my riding and across British Columbia, people see this every day. Local governments, first responders and health authorities are left carrying the cost of a federal experiment that never should have been imposed in the first place. We know that when British Columbia sought this decriminalization exemption, no other province followed, not one. No other province came forward to ask to copy this model. That alone should have raised serious questions for the federal government. Instead, the Liberals treated British Columbia like a laboratory experiment.
The Liberals say these policies are about compassion. Conservatives believe in compassion too, but compassion means helping people get better. It means treatment. It means recovery. It means giving people a path out of addiction and not trapping them in it.
One of the most troubling realities raised by local health authorities in my riding is what happens when someone is finally ready to seek help. It can take up to two years to get a treatment bed. Imagine someone finding the courage to say, “I need help,” only to be told there is no space, no timely support and no real path forward, but there are more drugs.
We also heard serious concerns from witnesses about the Liberal approach to so-called safer supply. The theory is that if government provides cleaner drugs, people will eventually stabilize and then seek treatment. However, the second part of that argument is simply not happening. We do not have the treatment in place. Instead, many of these drugs are diverted, sold and exchanged for substances users actually want. That means the government is not ending addiction but actually feeding into it.
Now we have more evidence that calls the Liberal narrative into question. A peer-reviewed Canadian study on the closure of a supervised consumption site in Red Deer found no increase in deaths, no increase in emergency department visits and no increase in opioid-related EMS events after the site closed. In other words, when the site closed, more people actually moved to recovery. That matters because Liberals keep telling Canadians that these sites are the answer, even when the evidence shows that recovery-oriented care delivers better outcomes.
Canadians deserve better than this false choice between neglect and normalization. They deserve a government that will invest in treatment, prioritize recovery and restore hope to families who feel abandoned.