Hedy Fry

[Committees of the House, March 21st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the fourth report of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in relation to Bill C-311, An Act to amend the Holidays Act (Remembrance Day).

The committee has studied the bill and has decided to report the bill back to the House with amendments.

[Violence Against Women, March 9th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, as we progress towards gender equality here we must remember the plight of refugee and migrant women and girls worldwide.

Of the 65 million people displaced by conflict, 55% are women and children. Displaced women and girls often experience rape, forced marriages, and sexual slavery.

In addition to the risks to which all refugees are exposed, women and girls are exposed to sexual abuse by the authorities. Migrant camps offer little security or health care, and women do not have the benefit of the security afforded by proper identification.

In host countries, these women can be isolated by the pressure to maintain their sexual identity. This isolation limits their access to language and vocational training, as well as their economic security.

As we laud our own progress, let us remember that women's rights are human rights, and we cannot celebrate fully until all women enjoy those rights.

[Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, February 14th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I wan to thank the member for the important question, and to thank his colleague, the member for Vancouver Kingsway, for the kind words he said about this.

I am a physician, and in the government of Jean Chrétien, I was responsible for the Downtown Eastside because of the problem that was happening with overdoses, so I was there from the very beginning.

I look at evidence-based solutions. There are other things that we need to do not so much with respect to this legislation, because the bill must be passed now to get moving on this. We need to do things such as analysis at certain mobile units, at safe injection sites, and in other areas and on the street of whether or not a drug that is being used is tainted with fentanyl or carfentanil. It is because of the safe injection sites in Vancouver that we first found out that there were tainted opioids. We need to do that.

There is a clinic in Vancouver that is giving hydromorphone to a small group of very high-risk addicts. The people who were in the SALOME trials are now getting hydromorphone, which is important for saving their lives and keeping them off street drugs or from buying on the street.

There are some things the minister is working on but this legislation hits the nail right on the head of what we need to do right now.

[Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, February 14th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, yes, there is something ideological about preventing when we know that safe injection sites on evidence have saved lives.

Saving lives alone is not an answer, but saving lives is an immediacy. People go to emergency rooms when they have an accident. They want their lives to be saved so they can move into other areas such as keeping healthy and fixing the problem.

The minister and our government have been very clear. We have moved into the medium-term and the long-term problems but we need to deal with the immediacy of saving lives. If a person's life is saved, that person can then move on to treatment, that person can then move on to rehabilitation, and as has been shown in Europe with the advent of safe injection sites, that person can live a meaningful life. No one has denied that. The minister has put in place all of these things.

We set an opioid summit to talk about how we can move forward to the longer and the medium term. If the member had been listening he would have heard me say at the beginning of my presentation that public health deals with immediacy, medium and long term.

No one is suggesting that a harm reduction strategy is the only thing we need to do, but it is the thing we need to do now to—

[Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, February 14th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate my colleague from Vancouver Kingsway for a very excellent presentation. I think he understands the issue very well. This is an issue about health. This is, as the minister has said and as we have acknowledged, now a national public health crisis and steps are being taken to work across the country with resources, as we heard the minister saying, as well as working with all of the public health officers in every province to deal with this issue on the ground.

As a physician, the first thing I look at in any kind of public health emergency, whether it is a virus, whether it is a bacteria, whether as we see now overdose deaths from tainted opiates, is the immediate, urgent means of stopping the problem and of saving lives, of looking at a medium set of policies and legislation that would help us look at longer term solutions to the problem.

I want to congratulate the New Democratic Party for helping to move this so quickly through the House. It means that members get it; for most of us in the House, saving lives is paramount. We can put nothing else before saving lives.

I want to congratulate the Minister of Health for bringing about this change in repealing Bill C-2, which I consider to have been a very tragic and heinous, cruel bill that stopped people from doing what was necessary to save lives. If I may paraphrase something that was said by the Conservative health critic earlier on today, it was that yes, indeed, safe consumption sites save lives, but they help people to stay on drugs.

I want to ask anyone who has any ounce of common sense, which would they put first, saving a life, or saying that people should be able to stay on a drug that they are addicted to. We know all of this is a public health issue and all of this has to do with patient care and understanding the issues of public health.

I want to congratulate the minister because when the Supreme Court brought down its ruling, the Liberal Party was very adamant that we should listen to what the Supreme Court had said. I was the health critic at the time. The Supreme Court had exactly word for word the five criteria that the minister has put in the bill.

At the time I remember most of us were absolutely concerned that the Conservative Party brought in what was then called the Safer Communities Act, which no one saw the irony in because it certainly was not about safer communities at all. Therefore, what we see now is that since 2011 when the Supreme Court made the ruling, until 2015, four years had passed before the Supreme Court's decision had been considered by the government.

I think that is a pity and it was sad because it stopped safe injection sites from being set up across this country. It stopped harm reduction, which is about bringing down the mortality rates of any disease, of any condition, of any public health problem, and bringing down the disease rates as well, not just saving lives, but bringing down disease rates. We saw the safe injection sites. I am proud to say I was the minister responsible for the Downtown Eastside, setting up the Vancouver agreement and agreeing with the harm reduction principles that were set out in the four-pillar approach by the then mayor of Vancouver, Philip Owen. During that time, we had the UBC Centre of Excellence for HIV/AIDS, which did the actual project by 24 peer bodies around the world that was accepted as being well done and the evidence was completely accepted.

At that time, we had 90 safe injection sites around the world, in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scandinavian countries, Australia, and Portugal. This was happening. People had seen that evidence and this was when we were concerned about 234 overdose deaths in the Downtown Eastside. We saw that once a safe injection site had been set up, evidence showed that there were no overdose deaths from anyone who came into that safe injection site. We had in fact stopped deaths. The other thing that was noticeable was that the crime rates had gone down in that area, so public order was restored.

We also saw that these very high-risk people who had actually started to use Insite at the time suddenly decided that they wanted to go into treatment. These were high-risk addicts. They went into treatment at OnSite, which is above the Insite site. There were 25 beds there for people who wanted to go into treatment. This was an important piece of the evidence as well. It not only saved lives, it also helped people to go into treatment. We saw that it had restored order, and fulfilled another criteria; it allowed people to have hope and to begin to want to build new lives.

These are some important things when we look at harm reduction. When I heard the Conservative health critic say in the House this morning that evidence shows it may save lives, but it helps them stay on the drugs, I wonder why ideology should take human life so lightly. These are human beings, and just because they happen to be addicted to a drug does not mean they are unworthy. Who should say what lives are unworthy and what lives are worthy? That is what we are talking about here.

I am pleased to see the minister moving forward, calling this a national public health crisis. I am pleased to see the extra pieces with regard to opening of suspicious mail that may contain up to 30 grams of fentanyl. We know that 30 grams of fentanyl can actual cause 15,000 deaths. This is a huge number. We are talking about deaths in the thousands.

After Insite, we not only saw the deaths were stopped, we also saw that the rate of HIV reduced. There had been 2,100 new cases of HIV/AIDS at the time Insite opened. That went down to 31. We are talking about the need to look at this as something that is essential.

I am pleased to see the New Democrats supporting the bill. I am pleased to see everyone in the House determined to move it forward, because it is essential if we are going to have safe injection sites, and all the evidence has proven safe injection sites save lives and bring down mortality and morbidity.

I understand when the leader of the Green Party talked about not wanting to intervene in civil liberties by opening these envelopes, but in the case of lives being saved, it is an essential thing we must do.

I am glad to see the minister bringing up precursors in the bill, to stop precursors. They are important in many instances, but at the moment we have to decide that stopping precursors from being given without going through a prescription and being approved, is actually one way of saving lives.

As a physician, I can say that lives will be saved as a result of the action the minister has taken with this bill, and by making naloxone widely available. As the member of the NDP said, it is important that the mobile units that are helping to save lives at the moment in Vancouver Centre, which are infringing on the law, should be able to give this. It should not simply be given in a buffer zone, but should be considered across the country if we see this as a national crisis.

There are other things we can do. We were asked what those were. The minister has moved very swiftly to do some of the things that are necessary, but we need to look at a public awareness campaign for all the young people, the young professionals, and youth who are not necessarily addicted, but who are recreational drug users, to let them know that using drugs off the street is a dangerous thing to do. When the minister first became minister, she moved to allow for the SALOME project, which had also been done under the Chrétien government, to show whether or not the use of substitute pharmaceutical grade heroin was important to save lives. It was shown that allowing hydromorphone, which is being used in the heroin assisted treatment in Europe and Scandinavia with a great deal of success, is saving lives and helping people to manage their addiction so they do not have to buy off the street anymore. They can go to the clinic and get a pharmaceutical drug, which costs pennies, to be able to save their lives and move them off the street drugs. We have to stop the illicit trafficking. That is of key importance.

If we continue to only look at the demand side of the problem and do not look at the supply side of the problem, illicit opiates will continue to not only kill people but damage lives for a long time.

A lot of the work that has been done in New York gives us the ability to truly look at evidence-based solutions to this problem, to act as quickly as we can, and to make these decisions not based on ideology, but based on clear evidence and science.

[Homelessness, February 8th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I stand today to pay tribute to an organization called Raising the Roof which is providing national leadership on long-term solutions to homelessness in Canada.

Homelessness is not a choice. Safe shelter is a human right. The homeless are often women fleeing abuse, immigrants and refugees with nowhere to go, youth at risk, and individuals suffering from mental illness and addiction. Once homeless, people find themselves trapped on the streets in a vicious cycle.

Yesterday, Tuesday, February 7, marked the 20th anniversary of Raising the Roof's toque campaign. Fifty communities across the country will be selling toques as a fundraiser to support at-risk people in their time of need.

I encourage everyone to take part in this national initiative. Buy a toque, wear a toque, raise a roof.

[Health, December 13th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, Canada is facing a public health crisis of tragic proportion. In B.C. alone there were 700 deaths this year from fentanyl-laced opioids, and 1,100 across the country. In B.C. and Alberta, thousands are treated, near death, in emergency rooms. Most affected are IV-drug users, youth, those who use recreational drugs, and first responders who are at risk from this high-potency fentanyl.

Can the Minister of Health tell us what she is doing now to save lives, and what tools and resources will she employ to prevent more deaths?

[Committees of the House, December 8th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the third report of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage entitled, “Interim Report on Media Study: The Impact of Digital Technology”.

[Interparliamentary Delegations, December 8th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 34(1) I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the reports of the Canadian parliamentary delegation respecting its participation at the 25th Annual Session of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Tbilisi, Georgia, from July 1 to 5, 2016, and the autumn meeting of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Skopje, Macedonia from September 29 to October 3, 2016.

[BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, December 1st, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, when the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS opened in 1992, one British Columbian a day was dying from AIDS. Today, the centre for excellence, headed by Dr. Julio Montaner, is at the forefront of the pandemic, focused on health and social determinants, prevention, and new antiretroviral treatments. It is lauded by the World Health Organization for its major advances in antiretroviral therapy, adopted by many nations globally.

The B.C. government made “treatment as prevention” universal a few years ago, and coupled with social programs like harm reduction and Insite, B.C. now has the lowest number of new HIV cases in North America. Yet HIV/AIDS continues to rise alarmingly in other parts of Canada. Globally, there are still 2 million new cases a year.

I am proud my new government embraces evidence-based HIV/AIDS health policies focused on most-at-risk populations. I am proud we have committed to the WHO 90-90-90 target here and internationally.

Today, my friend Dr. Julio Montaner is on the Hill—