Fentanyl crisis has Liberal MP criticizing own government

OTTAWA • A Liberal MP is speaking out about what she considers a frustratingly slow response by her own federal government to the crisis of fentanyl, the potent opioid linked to more than 500 overdose deaths last year in B.C. and Alberta alone.

“I feel it’s something we need to be doing something about faster than we are doing it,” Hedy Fry, the longtime Liberal MP for Vancouver Centre, said in an interview.

The number of Canadian deaths from fentanyl — often used to cut other drugs, such as heroin, cocaine or oxycodone — is highest in B.C. and Alberta, prompting Fry to suggest that a regional bias, albeit unintentional, might be at play.

“I think that it is that the whole country isn’t suffering from the same problem — it’s B.C. and Alberta,” Fry said.

“It’s now starting in Ontario, and I would suggest to you that once it gets bad in Ontario, we will notice action being taken.”

It’s not the first time the government has been accused of being out of touch with what’s going on elsewhere in the country, although the criticism doesn’t usually come from inside the federal Liberal caucus.

Terry Lake, the B.C. health minister, made a similar point at an opioid summit in Ottawa last November, when politicians met with doctors, public health experts and others to explore solutions to the epidemic.

“It took a while for them to understand the magnitude of the situation, because the numbers here in B.C. are so much greater on a per-capita basis than they are in Ontario,” Lake said in an interview Friday.

Andrew MacKendrick, a spokesman for Health Minister Jane Philpott, said the federal government has been working hard to tackle the issue.

“We have been working throughout the year to pull as many levers as possible to address this public health crisis, but certainly recognize that more needs to be done,” MacKendrick said.