So V ote

Jun/4/24 1:37:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as my colleagues mentioned earlier in their analysis of the NDP motion, it is targeting a genuine problem but proposing a false solution. How would we cap the prices of essential foods? I would like my colleague to tell me how the price of bread can be capped when wheat prices are negotiated on the Chicago Stock Exchange.

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Jun/3/24 1:46:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the House recognized Quebec as a nation. Through a unanimous vote in its National Assembly, Quebec is calling for a right to opt out with full compensation to improve its own program, which it has been administering for 30 years. Does the leader of the NDP agree with the Quebec National Assembly?

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Jun/3/24 1:27:24 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-64

Mr. Speaker, as my colleague has clearly demonstrated, Bill C‑64 is much more the expression of an election agreement than of a bill. Why? That would be because a bill of this scope would have required prior coordination, at least with the nation that put a system in place 30 years ago. Here in the House, the Quebec nation has been symbolically recognized on two occasions, but the moment that that has a legislative impact, it is out of the question. The National Assembly unanimously agreed that it wanted the right to opt out with full compensation to improve its plan. What is so hard to understand about that? My colleague clearly demonstrated that. The worst part is that, in addition to the first phase of the bill, the government intends to implement something with no accountability. Has anyone ever seen a Canadian prime minister lose their seat in an election because of health care? It has never happened. Why? Because health care has never been their jurisdiction. In Quebec, however, governments have fallen over health care. The government wants to meddle in the affairs of others, and with no political accountability, to boot. What does my colleague think about that?

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Jun/3/24 12:57:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Quebec realized a long time ago that it needed pharmacare. The Bloc Québécois is calling for Quebec to have the right to opt out with full compensation, so that it can improve its plan. That is also what the Quebec National Assembly called for unanimously, across party lines. I have a simple question for my Conservative colleague. What are the Conservatives proposing for pharmacare?

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Context: House Hansard - 315 - May/22/24

Jun/3/24 12:24:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in his speech, my colleague talked about the contributions needed from Quebec and the provinces. Would he not agree that, when it comes to pharmacare, Quebec is already making a significant contribution with its hybrid program, which does cover everyone? Even people with no income are covered by the public component. We do have a public component. First, I would like to hear my colleague's thoughts on whether it would be more cost-effective for the federal government to give us our share so that we can improve our own system based on the federal government's objectives, in order to avoid harmonization issues. Second, given that any duplication really bothers me, I would like to know what the Canadian drug agency is going to do that the Institut national d'excellence en santé et en services sociaux, the Quebec institute for excellence in health and social services, is not already doing in Quebec.

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May/22/24 2:19:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in February 2023 the joint committee recommended, by a strong majority, that individuals suffering from such diseases as Alzheimer's or dementia be allowed to make an advance request for medical assistance in dying. Although 83% of Canadians support advance requests, the health and justice ministers are unequalled in their complete lack of political courage and total failure to understand the file. They still expect afflicted patients to bear the burden of having to argue their case in court. Today, buoyed by the support of the Collège des médecins du Québec, the Barreau du Québec, the Chambre des notaires du Québec and a number of associations, we again call on the government to allow Quebec and any province so inclined to move forward with advance requests. To those who are suffering, like Ms. Demontigny, I would just like to say that we will never forget them and we will never abandon them.

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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 5:25:28 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his thoughtful speech, which also proposed a solution to today's debate. Unfortunately, it was rejected and I am very disappointed. My colleague was talking about the fact that—

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May/9/24 5:07:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, one of the pillars of the strategy is harm reduction. This includes, among other measures, supervised consumption sites and safe supply. Often what we hear from the critics of harm reduction are the negative impacts of these programs. Could my colleague tell us about the positive effects of these programs?

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May/9/24 4:53:40 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague is urging us to vote in favour of the Conservative motion. The problem is that the motion muddies the waters. Legalization is not decriminalization. Only Vancouver tried decriminalization. Toronto and Montreal have not done it, nor have they decided to do it. They are trying to set up diversion measures instead. Here is the problem. My colleague may not be an expert, but he should at least be able to define these three concepts, these three tools, so that everyone understands what is happening and what measures are being implemented. I see why my colleague cannot do that: Even his own leader cannot do it. They member's colleague may well be a doctor, but that does not give the member the authority to say that his colleague's comments were accurate when they were not. That is my comment. Is my colleague saying that Montreal wants to legalize hard drugs? Is that what he is saying?

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May/9/24 12:34:33 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, decriminalization, British Columbia's pilot project, has nothing to do with overdoses, but it did make it possible to divert these people away from jail and the justice system. We need to be careful, though. Yes, this is true, but drug consumption can qualify for diversion too, because in co-operation with community projects, we can ensure that police intervene, that they be authorized to intervene, but that they refrain from arresting the individual. Perhaps this is what B.C. is returning to. The fact remains that we agree on one thing: These people must receive care, but above all, we need the resources to give them care, and we must stop feeling like we have done enough by simply diverting the individual, because we are leaving them in the street alone with their problems. We need to invest heavily in health care. The government has been miserly about investing in health care, and so have the Conservatives. Health transfers need to be increased, because the provinces and Quebec are the ones that are taking care of these people and that have to treat them, and they are crying poverty. We must not undermine all the good things that are being done to take care of these people with the inadequate means at hand. This needs to be heard in our debate.

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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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May/9/24 12:06:20 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-5

Madam Speaker, in today's debate, we must not forget the over 42,000 people who have died. We must also not forget their families, who have suffered as they watched their loved ones get caught in a downward spiral. I want us to have a respectful debate, where we do not use people who are sick and suffering to further a political or ideological agenda. I want us to work on solutions, while respecting frontline workers and hearing and listening to what they have to say. For some weeks now, at the Standing Committee on Health, we have been hearing from witnesses, experts, people who work with individuals who struggle with addiction. They have been telling us about the situation. What we can say today is that substance abuse, multiple substance abuse, is not a simple problem, and it is not first and foremost a judicial problem. It is a severe and complex public health issue. I think everyone can agree, or at least I hope they can, that drug addiction is a very insidious, chronic and multifactorial illness. At one time, it could be said of addicts that they were slowly making their way to hell. The introduction of a synthetic opioid, fentanyl, has now tragically reduced the length of that journey. That is why I think that, in 2024, we need to call it an illicit drug crisis. That is what is causing overdoses. This is a complex issue, and simplistic solutions are not the answer. Between 50% and 70% of addictions are associated with primary mental health problems. People need better access to first-line treatment. I will get back to this later, but the lack of investments in health care is not helping. We cannot solve a problem, discuss a problem, find solutions to a problem or measure the effectiveness of these solutions without first agreeing on the concepts involved in addressing it. I am totally stunned this morning. I always thought that the Conservatives and the Leader of the Opposition deliberately spoke in vague terms, that they wanted people to believe that all of the parties except theirs were in favour of legalizing hard drugs. That is no small thing. If, on their criminology 101 exam, an applicant to the criminology department was asked the difference between legalization, decriminalization and diversion and they gave the answer the Conservative leader gave earlier, that they are all the same thing, that they are just synonyms, that we are using different words that mean the same thing, that person would be rejected. How can anyone talk about a problem when they do not even understand the concepts needed to describe and discuss reality? There is no one in the House right now who thinks we should legalize hard drugs to deal with the illicit drug crisis. The problem, as we will see later in the analysis of the Conservative motion put forth this morning, is that the concept of legalization is being used indiscriminately. Legalizing drugs leads to the commercial production of the substances in question. All drug-related offences are removed from the Criminal Code to allow people to use drugs. It could result in commercial production and sales and freedom of purchase and use, as was the case for cannabis. Can we agree that that is far from what we want? Decriminalizing simple possession for personal use by an addict is not at all the same thing. Can we agree on that? If we cannot agree on that, where is this debate going? What are we talking about, exactly? Decriminalizing drug use, and by extension avoiding making a person suffering from addiction go through the judicial process, is not the same thing as legalizing drugs. It is a way of destigmatizing the addiction and giving the addict, among other things, access to services and resources. For people to get to rehab, when that is what they want, we need to be in contact with them. If they are using drugs in secret, if they cannot talk about their addiction for fear of being stigmatized at work, does anyone think they will openly ask for help if they can be criminally charged? If they were unfortunate enough to take a pill from an illicit laboratory, they could die. What people need to know is that this disease involves relapses, and no one ever wants to talk about that. People think all it takes is a stint in rehab and the problem is solved. That is not true, because relapse is part of the healing process. It is a complex problem. Let us imagine managing to convince someone to go to rehab. Relapse is part of the process. Let us then imagine that that person no longer has access to supervised drug sites, which is what the Harper Conservatives proposed in 2011. The Supreme Court refused and said it was important because it would be injurious to the safety of people suffering from drug addictions. If a person relapses and no longer has access to these sites, they will take illicit drugs and will have less tolerance to the drug because opioids create a dependency. They could die. People talk about harm reduction, and those who work in the field say that supervised drug sites play an important role in harm reduction. Why is that? Because of illicit drugs. They can be tested to see if they contain fentanyl. Of course, we need to deal with the issues arising from sharing spaces in the community. People who do not have a drug problem should not be left holding the bag. However, that does not negate an entire strategy based first and foremost, let us not forget, on prevention. It is not simply a matter of preventing drug use. It is also a question of preventing relapses, avoiding stigmatization and fostering social reintegration. There is an incredible new project in my riding: a refurbished Uniatox. I am a little emotional. For the first time, this organization is going to work toward preventing relapses. There are not a lot of projects like that. An utterly simplistic approach would be to stay away from harm reduction altogether. Just send people to detox, and then expect them to man up or woman up and deal with their life issues. This, however, is not the way to go. People will relapse. Supervised consumption sites do help people stabilize their drug use. Harm reduction is one of the four pillars. I also talked about prevention. In this opioid crisis, a single pill can kill a person, so recriminalizing drugs will not solve the problem. That has absolutely nothing to do with it. I could go out on the street right now and get a black market pill. It has nothing to do with decriminalization. There are a lot of overdoses in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and New Brunswick. Quebec does not have quite as many, according to the statistics I saw, but we have to be careful with that. Harm reduction also means safe supply. Why? Because we need to save lives, because illicit drugs kill. As far as I know, the fourth pillar, enforcement, is still not very effective. In fact, for 50 years the repressive war on drugs approach solved nothing. If we compare the U.S. model to Portugal’s, we see that the United States is far behind. Still, is there a country more hostile to decriminalizing simple possession and more hostile to diversion? I have yet to speak about diversion, but that is what Bill C-5 called for, diversion measures. To continue with the U.S.-Portugal comparison, Portugal had one million heroin addicts and a shocking public health problem surrounding HIV transmission. They decriminalized, but they did not put the cart before the horse. They did not simply ease their consciences by going the diversion route and standing pat. We must invest money, redouble support measures, and hire social workers, frontline workers and street workers. More controlled-supply centres are needed, and we must constantly adapt and course-correct. I see people saying that the BC pilot project is terrible. It is indeed terrible, but is it the decriminalization that is terrible? No, it is the fact that they are facing a crisis that no one here would be able to solve with a snap of their fingers. Everyone needs to work together. Yes, the people in British Columbia need to make some changes, but decriminalization does not necessarily mean people can use wherever they want. This can be regulated. I imagine this is where they are headed. Furthermore, there can be no denying the problems of sharing spaces with the community. I made myself a crib sheet about the legal pillar. We were taught this in criminology back in the day. At one end, there is criminalization. At the other end, there is legalization. That is a spectrum. On the criminalization side, there is the death penalty. Is there a more severe punishment than a death sentence? Then there is incarceration, followed by fines. Next up, we slowly go into the diversion and decriminalization spectrum. This could involve supervised consumption, the possibility of diverting the person before the courts, targeted interventions by the police, formal cautions, administrative penalties and fines. There can be decriminalization of simple possession, which is not yet legalization. Next, there is regulation of retail sale and of commercial production, and then legalization. That is legalization. One can say that this constitutes a spectrum. When I hear the opposition leader say it is all the same thing, I have to tell him no, it is not the same thing. There are tables available. A little reading would help. It is as though I said that the death penalty was the same as incarceration. No, there are different measures, there is differentiation within the decriminalization spectrum, including diversion measures. This is what Montreal and Quebec have gone with, diversion. Bill C‑5 contained an important provision that included a diversion measure for simple possession offences. Among other things, it led to the implementation of the pilot project in British Columbia, which started in January 2023 and just ended. Has it really ended? The answer is yes and no, because I expect they are going to make the necessary adjustments. For anyone who is unaware, this crisis has been growing since 2016 and spiked during the pandemic. Why? Because people were isolated then. When someone overdoses while they are alone, they cannot self-administer naloxone. Furthermore, unless people use in supervised consumption sites, they cannot get naloxone. The motion is incorrect. Let us examine point (a). (a) proactively reject the City of Toronto's request to the federal government to make deadly hard drugs like crack, cocaine, heroin, and meth legal; The statement is incorrect. Last January, the City of Toronto submitted a new version of its drug decriminalization plan to Health Canada, and the city is working on decriminalization, not legalization. (b) reject the City of Montreal's vote calling on the federal government to make deadly hard drugs legal; Similarly, Montreal is working on diversion measures, in collaboration with police forces and public health, so that frontline workers, everyone together, can coordinate their work. There are problems, of course, but everyone needs to work together, and they will. However, we are a long way from decriminalization and even further from legalization. (c) deny any active or future requests from provinces, territories and municipalities seeking federal approval to make deadly hard drugs legal in their jurisdiction; Once again, this is ridiculous, utterly ridiculous. No one is talking about legalization, but rather decriminalization, and even then, not everyone is calling for decriminalization. Some jurisdictions have thought about the issue, have changed their minds and are choosing greater co-operation among stakeholders in the field, with diversion measures, to avoid clogging up the courts with people who really should not be in prison but should be getting treatment, because prisons are not therapeutic places. People are coming together to say that they will continue to work collaboratively to try to gradually resolve any issues they may have related to sharing a space in the community. (d) end taxpayer funded narcotics and redirect this money into treatment and recovery programs for drug addiction. This is basically saying that taxpayers are funding the opioid and overdose crisis. That is not what is happening. This program was put in place to prevent deaths, and evidence shows that safe supply is actually reducing overdoses right now. Imagine how much worse the crisis would be without it. I have to stop there.

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Context: House Hansard - 310 - May/7/24

May/9/24 11:49:34 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I was listening to the Conservative leader's response to one of my colleagues who was asking him to make the distinction between legalization, decriminalization and diversion. He said it was just semantics, that there was no real difference, that people just made up those distinctions depending on the context. What does the minister think of the Conservative leader's ignorance?

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Context: House Hansard - 310 - May/7/24

May/7/24 3:17:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles knows full well that he is deliberately misleading the House by saying that the Bloc Québécois is calling for the legalization of hard drugs in Montreal. Let him prove it by tabling—

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Context: House Hansard - 310 - May/7/24

May/7/24 12:49:08 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the bill includes a commitment to introduce dental care and pharmacare. The Quebec nation, speaking unanimously through its national assembly, told Ottawa it did not want this. What we want is the right to opt out with full compensation. We will enhance our own programs ourselves based on our own priorities. Can my colleague tell me how a member from Quebec could possibly ignore the unanimous voice of the Quebec nation, as expressed by its national assembly, and see what Ottawa is going to do as political progress?

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