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Member of Parliament

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith

  • Member of Parliament
  • Member of Parliament
  • Liberal
  • Beaches—East York
  • Ontario
  • Voting Attendance: 64%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $123,505.63

  • Government Page
Context: House Hansard - 26 - Feb/8/22
Mr. Nathaniel Erskine-Smith (Beaches—East York, Lib.)
  • Feb/8/22 8:39:08 p.m.
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Madam Chair, at the outset, I will be sharing my time with the member for Vancouver Centre. I also want to thank the member for Yukon for ensuring that this take-note debate happened. I very much appreciate his advocacy and the health-focused advocacy that he has. The sheer scale of this crisis is hard to fathom. We have lost 25,000 Canadians since the beginning of 2016. Every one of those has a personal story, of course, impacting many more family, friends, co-workers, loved ones and others, but it is not just opioid-related deaths. We should describe this problem as what it is: It is a poisoned drug crisis. I think a recent report from Public Health Ontario and the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network described it accurately as an opioid toxicity crisis, and we should all describe it in this way. We know the laws on the books are ineffective. The police chiefs have told us the laws are ineffective, but it is worse than that. The laws actually contribute to these deaths because they push people away from treatment. We know that on the evidence. They stigmatize people and they push people away from treatment. What is worse, prohibition is the absence of regulation. When it is left to the black market, what we get is poisoned drugs and those poisoned drugs are killing people. It is prohibition that is killing people. We know that it is getting worse, of course, in this pandemic. It was bad before the pandemic, but it is getting worse. What is the answer? I have heard colleagues say they do not know the exact right approach. I have heard the Prime Minister say that decriminalization is not a silver bullet, and it is not. We absolutely need to do everything we can to stop the scale of death. Let us listen to the experts. There was a recent substance use task force that included a police presence, that included a presence from mental health experts, and that included a range of different voices. Do members know what they called for? They called for bold action for decriminalization, and for a regulatory approach. Let us talk about regulating a safer supply and expanding that safer supply. Do members know what the answer to a poisoned drug crisis is? It is ensuring that the drugs are not poisoned. It is as simple as that to save lives today. Decriminalization is not a silver bullet, but do members know what it does? It ensures that we treat drug use as a health issue, and that we encourage people to seek treatment. I worry when the Portugal conversation comes up. By the way, Portugal still was probably more coercive than I would like, but if anyone wants to get up and support the Portugal approach, we should do that immediately because it would save lives. It not only removes the stigma and encourages people to seek treatment, but in Portugal they also wildly expanded treatment. That is also what we have to do, but not in steps when so many people are dying. We do it all at once. If we want to talk about Portugal, I would push back a little bit on my Conservative colleagues. I would say that Portugal decriminalized and rapidly expanded treatment at the same time because it was facing a crisis. Do members know what we need to do? At the same time, we need to rapidly expand treatment options. There was $500 million promised in a platform that builds up $150 million from a previous Parliament. We need to deliver that money in the budget to make sure there is evidence-based treatment. That should go hand in hand with removing ineffective criminal laws, and those are not my words but the words of police chiefs, that push people away from the very treatment we want to provide. We need a safer supply, because a poisoned drug crisis is killing people. Members should not listen to me. They should listen to CAMH. Listen to the police chiefs. Listen to the experts on the substance use task force. Listen to every single expert who has looked at this issue with any seriousness to say what we are doing is killing people. Let us do something differently and, yes, let us do it all at once. This level of a crisis demands that we do everything we can, all at once, to save lives.
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