44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 8, 2022 10:00AM
- Feb/8/22 9:09:46 p.m.
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Madam Chair, Cassy was a daughter, a sister and a friend. She met the intersection of mental illness and addiction, and the system failed her.
Cassy's lifeless body was discovered at a local music store in my riding of Peterborough—Kawartha on election day, September 20, 2021. Cassy was one of 17 people a day in Canada who died from opioid poisoning. She tried to get help and her family tried to get her help, but it was not there.
Let us talk about the stats. In my riding of Peterborough—Kawartha, from March 2020 to December 2021, 75 people, including Cassy, died from an opioid poisoning, and 25 people died from COVID. How is our opioid crisis not a state of emergency?
Our hospital in Peterborough has double the opioid death rate of the rest of the province—double. We also have the highest unemployment rate in Canada and a housing crisis. These things are not exclusive of each other.
We need a national plan. We need to look at the return on investment when we delve into prevention, treatment and recovery. Right now we are caught on a merry-go-round. EMS respond to a an overdose call; they take the patient to the already maxed-out and resource-depleted ER, and the patient is released, only to overdose within hours or days, and the cycle continues.
I want to share a message I received from a constituent. I do not have permission from the family to share his name, so I will call him Johnny.
Johnny lost his mother and father to cancer within a few years of each other, and then lost his small family to a breakup. He turned to the streets. He overdosed and was hospitalized for a bit. He overdosed again last month, except this time he sat in the ER for hours without being attended to. He was apparently kicked out by security for being loud, vulgar and argumentative. He left on foot without a coat. His body was found in a local park the next morning. He froze to death.
One of my favourite quotes is from Mr. Rogers: Anything mentionable is manageable. We cannot manage what we do not acknowledge. This pandemic has magnified an already mounting crisis. People cannot manage the stress of trying to pay bills, taking care of kids and losing their jobs.
Mental health is physical health. One cannot separate the two. We need to change how we talk about mental health and addiction and we need to change how we treat it. I have a saying that education equals awareness equals change. We can be the change, but we have to acknowledge what the opioid crisis is. It is a desperate attempt to escape from both physical and mental pain.
Canada needs a government that will invest in offering recovery and healing. By definition in the medical world, opioids are prescribed to manage pain, and that is what they do, but it is not always physical pain the patient needs escape from. Canada has a chance to be a leader in how we treat pain. We have a chance to change how we help people heal. It will not be easy and it will take time, commitment and a lot more than just money to solve this crisis. We need a cultural and policy shift in how we provide health care, but we can do it. We are ready.
There is no effective strategy dedicated to the cause of the opioid poisonings. On a given day during my campaign, I would see EMS respond up to four times to an overdose call in the same area. How much is that costing? Imagine if we invested this money spent on resources to solve the problem rather than to react to the problem.
We need to invest in complete wraparound services. We need innovative treatment and recovery healing centres that do not just manage the addiction but look at the cause and manage trauma. We need to invest in the research to learn why someone turns to opioids. We need to evaluate how and when doctors are prescribing opioids.
With the right intervention and strategy, Cassy and Johnny could have been more than another statistic.
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- Feb/8/22 9:15:30 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I think tonight has been so emotional and profound for so many, because we all know across this House that it is a crisis. I absolutely agree with what my colleague, the member for Foothills, said tonight: We need a strategy. We cannot have a shotgun approach.
Before I came and spoke this evening, I messaged our chief of EMS in my region, who said the same thing, that we need a strategy and wraparound services. We cannot have these single, individual whack-a-mole approaches, for lack of a better term. We need to come together. We need a streamlined strategy.
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- Feb/8/22 9:17:28 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I wish I could respond in French. Hopefully in a couple of years I will be able to, but my French is not quite there yet.
Absolutely, the national housing strategy is a key partner. This opioid crisis, as we heard tonight from many members, is a spiderweb of a multitude of factors that come into play. As with everything in politics, we need to address one thing to help something else. So often when I saw Cassy, whom I spoke about in my speech, she did not have a home or anything to eat, so to manage that pain she often turned to addiction. Getting people into housing is a critical piece in managing the opioid crisis.
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- Feb/8/22 9:19:06 p.m.
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Madam Chair, the member is absolutely right. One of the reasons I chose to run to become an MP was our campaign strategy to provide $1 billion over five years to boost funding for indigenous mental health and drug treatment programs.
To answer her question, yes, absolutely.
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- Feb/8/22 9:36:02 p.m.
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Mr. Chair, my question is about diversion and its effectiveness if there is nowhere to take the patient. We absolutely do not want to criminalize addiction. It is absolutely a disease. I think we have all heard that this evening. However, if there are no resources, and there is nowhere to take someone, like a recovery centre, and no bed to take them to, how are we supposed to implement diversion tactics?
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