- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Bloc Québécois
- Montcalm
- Quebec
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $126,025.95
- Government Page
- May/9/24 5:26:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I hope that my colleague understood what I said.
He talked about the fact that the war on drugs, criminalization, is a model that does not work. We can compare the model used in the United States, where overdoses increased by 100%, to the one used in Portugal.
Can my colleague elaborate on that?
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- May/9/24 12:32:20 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, what I should say to add to my earlier answer is that harm reduction existed well before today's overdose crisis. When the Conservatives say that what we are seeing now is the result of harm reduction, they are wrong.
The problem is the illicit drug overdose crisis. People working on the ground told us that we needed to do something for people like the mother who came to see us, saying that if her son had had access to a safe supply program when he was going through withdrawal, he would not have died. He lost all the tolerance he had built up because he went through withdrawal and ended up taking illicit drugs. He died right away, without having the chance to become the good citizen he wanted to be.
I will avoid making things worse here. I could accuse the Conservatives of many things, but I will not. I just want us to talk, to tell the truth and to discuss evidence and data without letting political ideology get in the way, and especially without blaming the people who have died, their families and those who are currently suffering from addiction.
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- May/9/24 12:29:56 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, saying that we need to do more harm reduction does not necessarily involve doing more to ensure a safe supply. It means that we need to make changes to safe supply. We need more measures to ensure that these drugs do not fall into the wrong hands. Safe supply does not kill. What kills are illicit drugs on the illicit counterfeit drug market.
My colleague insinuated that safe supply drugs are making their way to schoolyards. I heard the same claims at the Standing Committee on Health, but the experts we met with said that there is no evidence for this. I invite my colleague to table an official document containing evidence about safe supply drugs being diverted and sold in schoolyards, rather than a mere newspaper article.
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- May/9/24 12:27:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I did not mention the Quebec plan, which has four pillars: more prevention, more treatment with opioid antagonists, more and better harm reduction, and enforcement to dismantle clandestine laboratories.
We want a ban on precursors, which are the substances needed to make counterfeit and deadly drugs. These labs add fentanyl and other substances to the drugs. People cannot even tolerate a single dose. We have to be able to dismantle and prohibit these labs.
The federal government should invest in the health care systems in Quebec and the provinces so that they can take care of their own residents. It is also high time to legislate in the matter of precursors.
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Madam Speaker, I will begin my speech this evening with two images. The first is that the cure is worse than the disease. The second is that we should not use a bazooka to kill a fly, but rather the appropriate tool, in other words, a fly swatter.
The government is being sneaky about it; that is the worst part. That is the story behind Bill C‑368. The government introduced this provision under the radar, in an annex to budget 2023, in Bill C‑47. From day one we have always made a distinction between natural health products and drugs, and rightly so. In the drug industry, in the pharmaceutical industry, people may have to bear the recovery costs, but they have 20-year patents. They are able to break even. What is more, there are no taxes on drugs.
The government makes a lot of money in taxes on natural health products so it can afford to pay for an inspection service that will guarantee the effectiveness and safety of natural health products. When we met in September, everyone agreed that consumers deserve to have effective products that are safe. Health Canada has to do its job in that respect.
What did the Auditor General's report reveal? First, in my opinion, there was a minor methodological problem. Rather than proceeding randomly, products, places and companies were targeted where problems were known to exist. Obviously, if problems are already known to exist, the audit will reveal a high percentage of problems.
There are approximately 91,000 natural health products. Of that number, 75 were analyzed in a targeted way, leading to the conclusion that Health Canada has not been doing its job to ensure product safety since 2014. That is what was found after checking the sampled products. Health Canada was caught with its pants down, so to speak. It played tough, tried to assert its credibility and brought out the big guns.
As legislators, we have always wanted to ensure that there is a balance when it comes to natural health products and access to those products, in order to guarantee free choice for consumers while also ensuring that when Health Canada approves products, it does its job after the fact and inspects those products. From 2004 to 2014, 53 recommendations were made. In September, when we heard from Health Canada representatives and the chief scientist, we realized that the answers were not credible.
I asked whether an impact study had been done on the industry, on small and medium-sized businesses, concerning the recovery costs required. I was told that it was based on Treasury Board guidelines. I imagine that the Treasury Board's main interest is getting its money's worth. What kind of service is it going to provide when, after all this time, and with all the taxes generated by the industry, it has not even been able to ensure an audit or any inspections throughout its mandate?
There are a few problems today. I asked the chief scientist how many adverse reactions there had been to natural health products in 17 years. I asked her to provide the numbers. We have yet to get an answer to that question. I also asked her what the numbers were for adverse reactions to pharmaceutical products. She replied that she had some numbers, but she still has not provided those either.
We know very well that, even though they are approved by Health Canada, pharmaceuticals can still sometimes have very serious side effects. However, that is no reason to discredit the entire industry. We are just doing our job and making sure that we do it properly. Contrary to what people might think and what the government tried to have us believe, the shell game that I am talking about, the one in Bill C‑47, happened in June, when we were voting on the March 2023 budget. Now we are getting letters and the public is starting to find out about this.
As legislators, we do not have any say over the regulations. We vote on laws. Regulations are then drafted on how the legislation should be applied. The problem is that we need Bill C‑368 to be sent to committee so that we can do our job as parliamentarians and look into the regulation that was brought in under which natural health products are now considered therapeutic products under Vanessa's Law.
It is very clear that we would not be where we are today if the government had been a little more transparent, if it had carried out the consultations it needed to and if it had worked with everyone to find some common ground to ensure that no harm would come to an industry that Quebeckers and Canadians have the right to have access to by choice. Natural health products are not forced on anyone through a prescription. No one is forced to buy them. When people choose to buy them, it is because, in a way, they have educated themselves.
It is true that they can pose risks, and it is also true that people have to follow their pharmacist's instructions. There are interactions, true. However, these interactions are between drugs prescribed by a doctor versus a pharmaceutical product that I am going to buy. We are not trying to trivialize anything, but just because there are a few bad apples in one industry does not mean that the entire industry should be discredited. That would undermine small and medium-sized businesses, which want to sell safe products. Their main motivation is people's health.
We would not be here if there had been a bit more transparency and if the people who came to testify in September had the courage to point this out to us. When they were told that their cost-recovery model was modelled on the pharmaceutical industry, they did not say one word, as if we would not figure out Bill C‑47's sleight of hand at some point. They took the entire model from the pharmaceutical industry and transposed it to the natural health products industry without allowing us to debate it. That is why there were two meetings on this. It was to get information about the problem.
There have been no more consultations so far. That is why we are going to vote in favour of Bill C‑368. We want to ensure that the legislator, who never has access to the regulations and can never review them through legislation, brings this to committee. There we will be able to work on it and find a balance regarding the government's claims that 88% of the 91,000 natural health products are deficient and have misleading labelling. This is a serious methodological bias that does not reflect reality, because in 2015, a randomized study showed that more than 90% of products were fully compliant. What happened in the meantime, then?
Maybe if the people at Health Canada did their job and carried out inspections, and maybe if they sent people their criteria, guidelines and information about where they want people to focus so that, during production, they can be certain that the product is okay, we would not be here today. The Bloc Québécois will indeed vote in favour of the bill.
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- Oct/20/22 7:19:52 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I do not know whether my colleague remembers what I said about my NDP colleague's bill, but the Bloc Québécois is very much in favour of approaches designed to divert those cases. The purpose of diversion is not solely to free up space in courts and jails, though. Diversion will only work with adequate funding and the concerted action required to ensure that these people do not wind up out in the streets with their problems. Decriminalizing drug dependency is not enough to clear anyone's conscience. That is not what this is about.
That is why Bill C‑5 is a step in the right direction. I do not know if the Conservatives voted in favour of Bill C‑5, but it seems like a step in the right direction to me. With that and the necessary resources, we will make progress in dealing with this issue, but there has to be money for this. To me, the leader in best practices for drug dependency is Portugal.
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