Conservative motion to condemn Liberals on safe drug supply fails in House – National | 24CA News
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has failed to steer the House of Commons to sentence the Liberal authorities‘s approach to fighting drug addiction.
In a vote of 209 to 113 Monday, MPs defeated a motion presented by Poilievre.
The motion took aim at the federal government’s hurt discount insurance policies, however targeted primarily on its determination to fund the provision of pharmaceutical options as a substitute for sure illicit medication to fight the opioid disaster.
The authorities has pointed to specialists who say {that a} poisoned drug provide is without doubt one of the foremost causes so many Canadians are dying from unintentional overdoses, and that offering entry to different medication instead saves lives.
Since turning into Conservative chief final fall, Poilievre has criticized that strategy as fuelling habit as an alternative of providing therapy. He argues it has led to wider entry to harmful medication by customers who, as an alternative of taking them, flip round and promote them. Poilievre has proposed diverting cash used to fund secure provide in the direction of therapy.
Mental Health and Addictions Minister Carolyn Bennett has advised MPs that Poilievre’s criticism of a substitute drug provide just isn’t based mostly on proof, along with her workplace including in an announcement Monday that Health Canada just isn’t conscious of substitute medication “flooding the streets.”
“For Pierre Poilievre to state untrue information about safer supply, and try to create barriers to accessing harm reduction services that are saving lives amid this ongoing crisis is incredibly irresponsible and dehumanizing to people who use drugs,” a spokeswoman mentioned in an announcement from Bennett’s workplace.
It mentioned the federal government takes reviews of diversion “very seriously.” Bennett’s workplace additionally identified that the British Columbia coroners service, which studied deaths from drug toxicity from 2012 to 2022 within the province, concluded there was “no indication that prescribed safe supply is contributing to illicit drug deaths.”
“The Conservatives want to take us back to the failed ideology of Harper-era drug policy, and the war on drugs that was proven to be ineffective, costly, deadly, and deeply stigmatizing,” mentioned Bennett’s workplace.
A coalition of teams that advocate on behalf of drug customers in B.C. and people whose family members have died from opioid-related overdoses launched an announcement Monday, voicing concern about hydromorphone, one of many drug options Poilievre has singled out as problematic.
The joint assertion from organizations together with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users says such prescriptions “help many of us reduce or eliminate our reliance on street drugs.”
“If we get cut off, our risks will go up.”
© 2023 The Canadian Press
