Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise in the House.
I want to take a moment just before I begin my formal speech to recognize and honour a young friend of mine. I met him as an infant, and I performed his funeral last summer. He was 22 years of age, and his name is Marek Seamus Henderson Pekarik. He died as a victim, as a person who was addicted to opioids and other drugs. He died, really, in the prime of his very young life.
Marek came from a fine family. He was very close to both his parents and has a wonderful sister. He was really able to light up a room every time he walked in, with his imagination and his fun. However, there was always an insecurity there, and there was always something that led him to want to be part of a group. That part of the group that he got into led him onto a pathway that led to an addiction. Part of that addiction may have been hereditary; one never knows about addiction. Ultimately, a tainted drug supply led to his death just over a year ago.
His family is still grieving. His friends are still grieving. I am still grieving. I wanted to raise his name in the House today because this is not just about giving family and friends a nod to say that we acknowledge their grief or their pain. This pain and grief in this opioid crisis is very real for many people.
No pain or grief should ever be politicized. This is one of those issues where we should learn how to work together. We should find a way to look outside our political differences and to look at a crisis that is affecting people every day in our provinces, our communities and our cities. We need to open up a door to look at the fact that there is no silver bullet in this battle. There needs to be a multipronged approach in a way that we get best evidence and that we find a way to ensure that we use that best evidence to get a plethora of treatments, options and ideas to attack the problem, because one size does not fit all.
Let me be very clear. The ever-changing, illegal, toxic drug supply is a primary factor driving this crisis, and too many people are losing their lives as a result of it. That is why Marek died.
Of course, there are underlying issues all the time. Of course, there are easy and facile answers that are going to be offered to people. The reality is that we have to get bad drugs off our streets and away from Canadians, as 22 Canadians lose their lives every day in this unrelenting, tragic crisis. These are sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, nieces and nephews, and aunts and uncles. They are grandparents. It is being driven by the increasingly toxic and unpredictable, illegal drug supply in Canada, which is killing, on average, 22 Canadians a day.
We have to use every tool at our disposal. That means we will not have perfection on any one tool. We have to find ways to do prevention, to find ways to address addiction in the very early stages, to understand that this is a health crisis and to help people as human beings. It means that we need to provide treatment.
That needs to be on-demand treatment, and we are not there yet. The federal government continues to supply money to provinces, to communities, to have more and better treatment. We are not there yet, but treatment is a critical part of this. Harm reduction is also part of it. We simply do not want people to die.
This is not a moral issue, and it is not primarily a legal issue. It is a health crisis, and people are dying. It is the same as people dying of cancer, of heart disease, of obesity and of so many factors in our world where people are dying. We need to have a medical approach that does not further stigmatize people who are already suffering in their lives.
This debate is doing nothing to further that issue. It is doing nothing to help the people who are the victims in this horrendous case. We need to focus on prevention. We need to focus on treatment, harm reduction and enforcement. All four factors are the central pillars of our government's approach. They need to be based on reason and on evidence. They need to develop best practices. We need to have an international lens to see what works and what does not work. We will make mistakes in things that work. We will honestly do that, but we will continue to learn every day as we try to solve this crisis together.
We need to look at emerging practices and solutions from around the globe, and we need to listen to the professionals who are engaged. That does mean law enforcement officers, but more than that, it means physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners and therapists. It needs to engage psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and street workers, the people who are listening, and it needs to involve the families of victims, people who love their children, who love their parents and who see the day-to-day destruction in their lives.
Our policies are not driving this problem. Anyone who says that does not understand the problem and has not spent time on the streets, in hospitals, in treatment centres or in prisons, where we see the effects of this horrible overdose crisis. It means they have not been at the funerals where I have been and that I have performed to actually deal with the outcomes of this horrendous problem.
To say our policies are contributing to it is simply incorrect. We know what the factors are, not all the factors, but most of the factors of addictions, and we are addressing them as root causes. We understand the complex issue around police enforcement, and we are working around the clock, and around the world, on enforcement. We also want best practices in understanding how it is that we are to get to the victims to make sure they are not further stigmatized and further hurt. We want to help, not to hurt. We know, primarily, that we want to stop deaths. The first way to do that is to stop toxic, illegal drug supply, the kinds of drugs that are getting to people and that are killing people.
According to the latest national data, 82% of overdose deaths involved illegal fentanyl. This percentage has increased by 44% since 2016. That was when national surveillance actually began. I note that because it was just after the Liberal government took office. We were not getting the data we needed before the government took office. Now, we are getting better data to surveil this situation and to understand best practices. It is the illegal drug supply that is contaminated with toxic levels of illegal opioids, other drugs, that is at the root cause of the overdose crisis in Canada.
To suggest that our programs simply hand out prescription drugs to anyone, including youth, is simply not true. It is not a fact. It is wrong. The clients of those programs are already using drugs and are struggling with addictions. They need care. They need help. They need the ability to fight their disease and to be given time so that compassionate, hopeful people can embrace them in love and can work with them in a medical way to ensure that they combat their addictions.
It means we need roads to recovery as well. We need pathways to recovery and need treatment on demand, but it does not matter that treatment on demand is available if people are dead. They are dying from toxic drug supply. They have been marginalized in the medical system. They need to be brought home. They need to be recognized as part of the medical system in our country, where professionals are able to meet them with no judgment, no stigma and certainly not with the political jargon or rhetoric that we hear today from across the other side of the House. It means absolute training for primary caregivers and primary medical service providers to ensure that they have the best tools and the time to do their work.
We hear a concern from the other side that there is a diversion of drugs from these programs. That is simply not true. Diversion is illegal, and steps are always being taken to stop it. We take those concerns seriously. We take them very seriously, and we encourage law enforcement officers to do best practices to counter that at every opportunity.
The Conservatives are portraying a fiction that our streets are flooded by prescribed alternative medications. There is no data to say that. What we need to do is to continue to ensure that diversion does not happen and that people have a span of time in their lives to get the treatment they need, to work on the healthy lives they want to live, to make sure that people like young Marek do not meet their deaths without options for treatment.
