The evidence is already clear
In recent days there have been two dramatically different provincial responses to the opioid crisis that is claiming thousands of lives right across Canada.
British Columbia tabled legislation to fast-track a provincial lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies and others in the opioid industry for downplaying the addictive nature of the drugs. The B.C. government is looking to take every possible step it can in the battle against opioid addiction and the escalating overdose crisis.
Ontario, on the other hand, is ignoring all the evidence supporting the importance of supervised injection and overdose prevention sites as a vital tool to prevent needless deaths as it continues to pursue a politically driven review of their “merit.”
And Health Minister Christine Elliott now says she needs yet more time to produce her review, which is expected to determine whether Ontario continues to support these harm reduction measures at all.
When Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives came to power they insisted on wasting precious time — and halting the opening of new sites — while the crisis worsens to conduct this unnecessary review.
Now, three months into it, Elliott’s announcement that still more time is needed can’t possibly be defended as a new government simply trying to get up to speed on an important issue. It increasingly looks like an extended fishing expedition, searching desperately for some rationale, however flimsy, to let the government move away from harm reduction.
“I know that everyone wants an answer right away, but the premier has indicated that he wants to make a proper evidence-based decision, and I don’t think anyone in the this House would disagree with that,” Elliott told the legislature on Wednesday.
Actually minister, there are plenty of people in the legislature, and even more outside it, who strenuously disagree with the delay and that entire premise.
Ford has already made abundantly clear what he wants to happen. After all, he says he’s “dead set” against safe injection sites. “We have to help these people,” he has said.
We already know safe injection sites do help people by saving their lives.
Staff at a single site in Toronto have reversed more than 200 overdoses in a single year. Not to mention the added benefits of reducing needle-transmitted diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C and helping to direct some addicts to treatment and rehabilitation.
That’s why medical experts have long supported providing addicts with a safe, supervised place to inject drugs. The alternatives are far worse.
No one who supports safe injection sites has ever said rehabilitation and treatment are not also desperately needed. It’s not one or the other — as Ford likes to pretend — it’s both. Because no one ever makes it to a rehabilitation clinic if they’re dead.
Last year more than a quarter of the 4,000 Canadians who died from opioid overdoses were in Ontario. Those 1,100 deaths in Ontario represented a tragic increase of more than 50 per cent over the year before, and there’s every reason to expect this year will be even worse.
At this point it’s unclear when Elliott’s review will be complete. But even more worrisome than the delay is that she says it’s the premier himself who will make the “final determination.”
To date, Ford has not shown himself willing to be swayed by evidence once he sets his mind on a particular course of action. And his ministers haven’t demonstrated either the willingness or the ability to stand up to his whims, whether that’s an issue as serious as slashing Toronto council in the middle of the election or as pointless as buck-a-beer.
This time, lives are on the line.