Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre speaks during a news conference in New Westminster B.C., on April 6.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
Pierre Poilievre says a Conservative government would change federal drug laws to prevent provinces from unilaterally opening overdose prevention services, adding he would fire bureaucrats who support prescribing regulated alternatives to toxic drugs.
The Conservative Leader’s crackdown on harm reduction would be paired with a commitment to fund addiction treatment for 50,000 Canadians, he said Sunday at a campaign stop in New Westminster, B.C. His government would also cut funding to federally sanctioned supervised consumption sites and prescribed alternatives programs.
“The question in this election is: Can we afford a fourth Liberal term of rising crime, drugs and chaos, or is it time for a new Conservative government to stop the drugs, treat addiction and bring our loved ones home drug-free, for a change?” Mr. Poilievre said.
Cheaply and easily manufactured illicit fentanyl began replacing heroin in Canada in the mid-2010s, resulting in a surge of overdose deaths from the much stronger synthetic opioid.
In response, some jurisdictions rapidly expanded harm-reduction measures. B.C. has experimented with some of the boldest and most contentious initiatives, decriminalizing simple possession and prescribing regulated opioids – commonly called “safer supply” – in efforts to curb deaths from toxic street drugs.
Supporters of such interventions say they have been too limited in scope and that drug deaths will not meaningfully come down without addressing toxic supply. Critics have countered that they have exacerbated the problem, pointing to the diversion of prescribed opioids from prescribed alternatives programs fuelling new cases of addition.
Mr. Poilievre says his government would shutter overdose prevention sites by allowing an exemption issued under the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to expire this September. Overdose prevention sites are lower-barrier and easier for provinces to open without federal approval than supervised consumption sites.
While supervised consumption sites are often connected to treatment services and come with a lengthy list of requirements that operators must meet to open, including community consultations and proof of need, overdose prevention sites can be as little as a tent or a room, a peer worker, sterile supplies, and naloxone.
Former B.C. health minister Terry Lake, who signed a ministerial order in 2016 to rapidly expand overdose prevention services as drug deaths were escalating, said he still feels strongly that they are extremely important.
“I do think we have been relying too much on harm reduction and not enough on the other pillars of the four pillars, but you don’t want to go like a pendulum from one extreme to the other and wipe out all harm reduction – that’s crazy,” he said.
Former provincial health officer Perry Kendall, who supported B.C.’s expansion of overdose prevention services, said it’s unclear whether allowing the exemption to lapse would force the shuttering of existing sites.
“I would think that if you sought to do that, there would be a challenge to the Supreme Court, just as there was when [former prime minister Stephen] Harper tried to close down Insite,” he said, referring to Canada’s first supervised consumption site.
Former Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson, now the Liberal candidate for Vancouver Fraserview–South Burnaby whom Mr. Poilievre attacked Sunday for advocating for the sites, said he worked around the clock with health experts, first responders and front-line leaders during his time as mayor to connect people to supports.
“In Pierre Poilievre’s 20 years as a career politician, he has done absolutely nothing to help address this crisis – no leadership, no solutions, no compassion,” Mr. Robertson said in a statement to The Globe and Mail. A Liberal government would work with law enforcement and invest in community-based supports to tackle the drug crisis, he said.
In a video posted to social media on Sunday morning, Mr. Poilievre said “bureaucrats who push taxpayer-funded drug handouts” – a reference to prescribed alternatives programs – would be fired. “Pro-drug organizations” would be banned from receiving federal funds, he said.
Meanwhile, a Conservative government would invest $1-billion – or an average of $20,000 for each of 50,000 Canadians – in a new, results-based funding model for treatment centres, Mr. Poilievre said.
“Organizations are going to be paid a set fee for the number of months they keep addicts drug-free,” with third-party validators confirming the results, he said.
M-J Milloy, an associate professor of medicine at the University of B.C. and a research scientist at the BC Centre on Substance Use, said such an approach is “a recipe for more drug-related deaths.”
He said “these types of abstinence-based, poorly regulated recovery centres are one of the engines of the North American overdose crisis because they change people’s tolerance, and then when [clients] break the rules, they kick them out unsupported and they often die of overdoses.”
Dr. Milloy advocates for “an increase in health care capacity in the public system – a wraparound system that includes harm reduction.”
On Sunday, Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, discussing the United States’s “unjustified tariffs” as well as the need to strengthen trading relationships with “reliable partners,” according to Mr. Carney’s office.
Mr. Carney, the Liberal Leader, will be campaigning out west this week, starting in Victoria. He’s also scheduled to meet with Premier David Eby on Monday in his capacity as prime minister. The leaders are expected to discuss softwood lumber tariffs after the U.S. Department of Commerce proposed more than doubling the current levies imposed on Canadian producers.
Meanwhile, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who was in Halifax on Sunday, ended a two-day tour of Atlantic Canada by cutting short a planned visit to a rally because of the stormy weather.
Earlier in the day, he pledged to implement national rent control to protect tenants from unfair rent increases, saying the federal government needs to “step up” to support people who are struggling.
“People are talking about how much their rent is costing them, how it takes up sometimes more than half of their income,” Mr. Singh said at an announcement in Halifax. “And that is wrong.”
With a report from Nojoud Al Mallees and The Canadian Press