- Member of Parliament
- Liberal
- Vancouver Centre
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 58%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $106,078.52
- Government Page
- Feb/8/22 8:58:00 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I will start by saying that we actually opened up safe injection sites, safe consumption sites, across this country, which were blocked and stopped for 10 years by the Conservative government. That is the first thing we did.
Second, we made naloxone available, which can immediately save someone who is dying of an overdose and prevent them from dying. We have been giving access to drugs to many provinces that have been able to accept it. The problem is that it is not reaching everyone. I talk all the time with colleagues of mine who are also physicians. They are telling me that the thing to do is to use what has been successful for 25 years in Europe, in Switzerland and Scandinavia, which is diacetylmorphine. It is an easy drug.
I have told my colleagues in government, because we recently found out this is something that is easily done, to provide a substance use and addiction funding program to doctors, nurse practitioners and others to give this drug, in its inhalable form and its intravenous form, to people who need it. The SUAP grant funding will make it happen because right now in the province of British Columbia, it is not being allowed by the provincial government.
My friends may say—
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- Feb/8/22 8:55:33 p.m.
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Madam Chair, decriminalization does have something to do with it. It removes the stigma. We are already moving forward with that as a federal government. We have asked attorneys general, federal and in every province, not to give criminal records to people who are using certain amounts. The City of Vancouver is willing to work on this.
I am in support of it, but the thing that saves lives, which is what I am focusing on tonight, is safe supply. When we look at the evidence, yes, Portugal has had some success, but the greatest successes are occurring in Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries where they are using safe supply. We need to recognize how people use it. It is not being used intravenously anymore. It is being inhaled. We see all kinds of people using it. We need to move forward to save lives.
Decriminalizing is important. It is one of the many tools that we have, but everyone is focusing on that and nobody is really talking about access to safe supply. The federal government has been giving access to safe supply and funding safe supply in every province that has asked for it. The thing we are talking about is how to make this inhalable drug available to 70% of users and how to ensure that we are using a tried and true for the past 25 years drug that has been shown not only to save lives but to get people into rehabilitation—
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- Feb/8/22 8:48:58 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I am so excited to participate in this debate. I think my colleague just said it all. We talk about a crisis. A crisis sounds like something existential. This is real. In my province of British Columbia, 6.5 people a day are dying from preventable deaths. This is a mental health issue. This is a mental health problem, and there is a way to deal with it. We can talk about decriminalization, and we can talk about a whole lot of other things. The only thing that would stop people dying from a toxic, illicit supply of illegal drugs is a safe supply of drugs. That is it. That is simple.
Since 2015, we have heard from my colleague that our government has done a great number of things. We have expanded safe consumption sites, and we have been able to allow everyone to have naloxone readily available to them, for if they have an overdose. However, we have also learned some other things.
Things have changed since this began. Now, 70% of street users inhale opioids. They are not using them intravenously any more. They are inhaling them. We need to deal with that. We are finding out that about 35% of people who are dying from an overdose are dying in private homes. About 50% are dying in social housing, in hotels and everywhere else. Only a small percentage of people are dying on the street. This mythical figure we have of some homeless person lying in the gutter using opioids is not true. Clear evidence tell us opioids are being used by professionals, families, people with children and middle-class persons. It is killing them. We need to stop it.
I think our government has done a great deal. We have brought in naloxone, as I said. We have been able to increase the number of safe consumption sites, and we have been helping with field operations to deliver harm reduction in cities across the country. We have been doing all of this, but the number of people dying each day is increasing.
I wanted to point out that, no matter what we have to say about safe consumption sites, in the most recent report from British Columbia there were no overdose deaths in safe consumption sites. Of these deaths, 55% were in hotels and single-room occupancy housing and social housing, and 35% were in private homes. Let us get this picture right.
The majority of people who are dying from overdoses are men under the age of 39. These are people in the prime of their lives: productive Canadians whose lives have been lost. We have it in our power to prevent this, and what we need to do is go with a safe supply.
We need to look at how we provide the right kind of safe supply, though. Right now, in Vancouver and in other places across the country, you can get intravenous drugs given to you in small clinics that do not reach everybody.
However, if people are inhaling the drugs, we need to be able to look at using a drug that has been used for 25 years in Europe. It is called diacetylmorphine, or DAM. DAM has been used with success. People who are taking it are beginning to live productive lives. They are going to work, they are having families and they are doing normal things because they do not have to worry about dying. I think the most important question to ask is how do we get diacetylmorphine into the hands of the people in Canada who need it?
One of the big things we found out is that the provinces are unwilling to do this. They are afraid. The political risk for them is too high, so we talk about decriminalization as if it is a magic bullet. It has nothing to do with anything. What I would like to suggest is that the federal government has it in its power to use the substance use and addictions program to deliver small amounts of money to pilot projects, driven by clinical practitioners in their practices, by physicians and nurse practitioners through telehealth, and by other ways of getting inhalable diacetylmorphine into the hands of people.
It is simple. It is an easy thing to do, it is clinically proven and it is evidence-based. The outcomes are great in Europe, where they call it heroin-assisted treatment.
Let us stop having ideology about this and stop moralizing about this. Let us save lives, people. We have it in our power to do so.
If we allow for SUAP to be given to the clinicians and nurse practitioners who want to use it through telehealth and other ways of getting this out to real people, then we can save those lives.
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- Jan/31/22 10:37:26 p.m.
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Madam Chair, Canada is at the table with NATO playing the role that it can and that it is asked to play around that table. Canada is at the table with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which is made up of 57 nation-states. Canada is well respected and trusted at that table. These are the people who are talking about the steps to deal with Russia. These are the people who live close to Russia, and they know what to do. Canada is also a close friend and ally of the United States. We are at the table. We have been at the table ever since we have been dealing with OSCE agreements that included Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
We are playing the role that we can play. When one is on a team, one is asked to play a certain role, and we are doing that. At the moment, this is a role that we feel, and that everyone has felt, is a good role for us to play. We are prepared, I am sure, to move forward if we are asked to play other roles, but Canada is definitely at the table, and I know because I am very involved in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
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- Jan/31/22 10:34:27 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I am talking about the word “trust” here. We trusted a government that told us it would be going into Czechoslovakia and it would not do anything else, and then it moved to take over Europe.
I do not know the bottom line of Putin's agenda, but I do know that he showed himself not to be trustworthy when he went into Crimea, when he armed his warships in the Baltic Sea, and when he threatened by his very presence a lot of the Baltic states and the Arctic Ocean. I think we need to remember that we have to be guarded. We should not be naive enough to believe whatever we are hearing from somebody who has shown that he is not to be trusted, and we need to be prepared. We need to start softly, but as with Georgia we also need to be prepared. I am not going to say we need to be prepared for war, but we need to be prepared to show our strength to come together as members of NATO or the OSCE.
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- Jan/31/22 10:28:46 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I want to speak to Canadians out there and constituents, because I have noted that many of them have been asking why Canada is worrying about this country. It is so far away up there in Eastern Europe, why are we bothered?
We are bothered because this is not just about us. It is not just about Ukraine. It is not just about NATO. It is not just about Europe. It is about the fact that one has to have a rules-based order to keep global security moving. One has to have relationships with countries based on trust.
What is shown is that in 1991, when Ukraine became a sovereign nation and became independent, it still carried the third-largest arms supply in the world. An agreement was made in 1994 at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe called the Budapest agreement. Everyone wanted nuclear disarmament and there was an agreement between the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia, Ukraine and Kazakstan that said that if Ukraine got rid of all of its nuclear storage, they would all agree that in exchange Ukraine, as a sovereign nation, would be protected and not have any aggression levelled against it. Its territorial integrity and its sovereignty would be accepted and realized.
Russia broke that. It broke that rule when it went into Crimea in 2014. It broke that rule again when it was amassing troops on the borders of Ukraine and along the Baltic states. It broke that rule, as the hon. member for Scarborough—Guildwood said, now that it is looking at arming the Baltic with warships.
Russia is giving us a message and the whole issue is about trust. We cannot trust its words, trust its agreements or trust its assurances. Global security is at risk when there is absolutely no trust, so we all need to be concerned about it. We have talked a lot about wanting peaceful solutions. We have talked a lot about not moving into war, but the way to prevent war is to have trust. The way to prevent war is to have a rules-based world order. The way to prevent war is to make sure that we can believe in each other and trust each other's word. Russia has proven itself not to be capable that, and not only in 2014, when it moved into Crimea. We know that it has moved into Transnistria. We know that the Baltic states are all very concerned.
I think this is something we need to think about. I do not know if members remember this in history, but I recall a time when a certain government said it would only move in to take over Czechoslovakia. We believed it and agreed. We thought it was all fine and wonderful. Then we saw it move to take over all of Europe, and then came the Second World War. We are on the brink of a global war. We need to think about that.
Obviously, we need to negotiate. Obviously, we need to try to find a peaceful resolution to conflict, but we also need to have an iron fist in a velvet glove. As we talk about the kinds of things we need to do with respect to negotiating, we need to have solidarity in our backpack, pardon my mixed metaphors, and things such as Magnitsky sanctions. We need to understand that money is being hidden in our countries by oligarchs and Putin himself. That money came from corruption. It came from the human rights denials of many people around the world. This is a government that we need to stop where it hurts, in the pocketbook and in the personal pocketbook. If that does not work, we need to think about the fact that we, as members of the OSCE and NATO, have to be prepared to take whatever steps we need.
Churchill said, “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war”, but sometimes, as he showed us, we have to do what is necessary to protect global security.
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- Jan/31/22 10:27:35 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I have been listening with a great deal of interest to all of the speakers and I think I want to speak to constituents out there. We all understand the issue. We know the regional—
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