Juno News - Carney’s budget NARROWLY PASSES + B.C. calls drug stigma “colonialist”

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Straight Up with Mark Petroni. I am your host. Appreciate you tuning in, my friends.

00:00:10.180 Well, the B.C. Human Rights Commissioner says treating illegal drug users like criminals is

00:00:15.200 not only racist, it's a violation of their human rights. Kasari Govender says even mentioning the

00:00:22.820 opioid crisis discriminates against users of potentially lethal drugs. Tristan Hopper writes

00:00:29.620 about it in the pages of the National Post. Headline, B.C. Human Rights Chief Declares

00:00:35.020 It's Colonialist to Stigmatize Drug Use. So according to the commissioner, talking about

00:00:41.500 the overdose crisis implies that doing drugs like meth or fentanyl is inherently unsafe.

00:00:48.540 Well, it was certainly unsafe for the 16,000 people who overdosed in British Columbia since 2016.

00:00:54.480 She says the real cause is the toxic chemical additives to those drugs.

00:00:59.620 She wants more policies that allow drug users to shoot up without stigma.

00:01:04.860 She wants more safe supply of drugs, including the distribution of free recreational opioids 0.99

00:01:11.920 to drug users. Anyway, Tristan will be joining us shortly with that.

00:01:16.800 The Liberals narrowly averted a critical defeat in the House of Commons on their budget yesterday.

00:01:22.360 Prime Minister Mark Carney says the budget is all about protecting Canada's way of life.

00:01:27.960 Very pleased that we passed the budget vote. There are more votes, of course, to come through

00:01:34.280 the budget process, but important step for our country, protecting our communities, protecting

00:01:39.860 our borders, protecting our way of life.

00:01:42.020 Now, two conservatives did not take part in the vote, nor did certain members of the NDP

00:01:46.360 who chose to abstain. In term NDP leader, Don Davies, explains why.

00:01:52.180 Why is it the NDP's responsibility to avoid an election? Isn't that the Liberals' responsibility?

00:01:56.340 Yes, it is. In fact, it's all parliamentarians' job.

00:01:59.640 Then why abstain? Why allow them the chance to not go to an election by abstain? Why make that choice?

00:02:05.280 I'm sorry, I'm not understanding your question.

00:02:06.300 You're saying it's the Liberals' job, but yet you're helping the Liberals avoid an election

00:02:09.680 by abstaining. Why?

00:02:11.000 Look, there's 343 people in the House of Commons. I've said from the beginning that it's

00:02:15.500 Mark Carney's responsibility as the Prime Minister of a minority government to craft a budget

00:02:20.200 that can earn majority support. But at the same time, we're in a unique situation right

00:02:24.060 now, six months after the last election, where Canadians don't want an election right

00:02:28.400 now. I haven't heard anybody dispute that.

00:02:30.140 Now, Conservative Party leader Pierre Paglia posted this reaction to the budget's passing.

00:02:36.700 Mark Carney's budget will drive up the cost of living on every Canadian, on food, on homes,

00:02:43.140 and on everything else Canadians buy. Conservatives demanded an affordable budget for an affordable

00:02:49.120 life. On behalf of the Canadians, the Liberals have priced out of food, homes, and life.

00:02:55.860 Conservatives voted no tonight on this costly credit card budget that gambles away Canada's

00:03:02.700 future. Paulie have described the budget passing as a good day for Carney and his Brookfield buddies.

00:03:08.660 While the singing of Canada's national anthem was not welcome at an event in Toronto where

00:03:15.180 the Palestinian flag was raised at City Hall, police stopped a pro-Canada demonstrator who

00:03:21.360 attempted to play a recording of the national anthem. Let's listen.

00:03:25.860 Canada officially recognized the state of Palestine on September 21st, along with countries

00:03:51.700 including the UK and Australia.

00:03:54.640 I'm now joined by Tristan Hopper in Victoria, British Columbia. He's the one who wrote that

00:03:59.460 column and you can read about it in the pages of the National Post. Welcome, Tristan.

00:04:03.280 Thanks for having me.

00:04:04.640 Well, the BC Human Rights Commissioner says, well, treating illegal drug users like criminals

00:04:09.920 is not only racist, it's a violation of their human rights. Have I got that right?

00:04:16.220 Basically, yeah. So you go through this report. So the context of the report is that on a few

00:04:23.980 levels, BC is starting to dial back the extremes of how far it leaned into harm reduction. There's

00:04:31.180 three prominent examples of that. So BC debuted decriminalization in 2022. So this was any personal

00:04:37.940 use amounts, anything below, I think, 2.5 grams of meth, heroin, all the illicit drugs. It was

00:04:44.000 effectively legalized. And that was dialed back. And now you have the NDP Premier of BC saying,

00:04:51.300 openly, this was a mistake. So he's been saying what a lot of normal people have been saying ever

00:04:57.400 since the beginning. He said, well, it was supposed to destigmatize drug use. But what it actually did

00:05:01.580 is it normalized drug use everywhere all at once? You'll probably remember there was that

00:05:05.760 BC Supreme Court decision as soon after decriminalization came in. And there was an

00:05:12.440 initial pullback from the BC NDP government. People were saying, hey, we can't play in

00:05:16.300 playgrounds anymore because it's full of people shooting up and smoking crack. And because you

00:05:21.280 decriminalize drugs, we can't actually send police in to arrest them. So there's just crack smoke

00:05:26.560 everywhere. We can't use the playground. So the BC NDP government said, okay, we're going to change it a

00:05:31.200 bit. Drugs are still decriminalized, but you can't smoke meth or shoot up in playgrounds specifically.

00:05:39.120 You have to, you know, police can now ask you very politely and there's no, there's still no

00:05:42.860 sanction, but they can ask you to do it at the other end of the playground. And there was a BC

00:05:46.840 Supreme Court decision, which said, actually, no, that's a violation of their section seven rights

00:05:50.640 security, the person, et cetera. So, you know, we had a court decision saying that, anyway, that's beside

00:05:55.920 the point. So they dialed back on decriminalization. We dialed back safer supply. This was

00:06:00.980 another BC experiment where we thought, well, we can steer addicts away from the black market if we

00:06:08.220 just distribute free recreational opioids. So, okay, if we just give you a daily ration of hydromorphine,

00:06:15.900 which is a very powerful opioid, you won't do fentanyl. And, you know, that might be, you know,

00:06:21.420 cut with something and that could kill you. The idea is that it wasn't the drugs that was the problem.

00:06:26.480 It was all the weird additives in the drugs. So if we just have them doing the government drugs,

00:06:30.200 but this is something the National Post, I think has covered, my paper has covered better than almost

00:06:35.000 anyone else, is diversion. So again, plenty of people could have told you this before you embarked

00:06:40.760 on the program. Addicts are just going to take the hydromorphine, flip it for cash in the black

00:06:45.420 market, and then use it to buy fentanyl because, you know, the high is not as good. Any addict,

00:06:50.880 you could have asked them and you would have learned that they did this. So we had massive diversion.

00:06:55.360 So just huge drug rings of, you know, an addict goes in, gets their ration, immediately sells it

00:07:01.580 for harder drugs. And we just had this flood of hydromorphine at rock bottom prices hitting

00:07:07.400 the black market. And something my colleague at the National Post, Adam Zeevo, has covered

00:07:11.240 is you have a bunch of high schoolers suddenly with, you know, basically free hydromorphine all over

00:07:18.240 the place, which has not been good for our overall drug addiction rate. So that was back in February.

00:07:22.560 And we've also had BC Premier David Eby talking about, we need to start involuntarily putting

00:07:32.220 people into treatment. If you are just a risk to yourself, you cannot get clean. There needs to be

00:07:36.400 involuntary options, such as taking a page out of the treatment-based program out of Alberta. So

00:07:41.160 those three things, that's the context. As this is happening, BC Human Rights Commissioner just puts

00:07:46.240 together a 22-page statement saying, all of this is wrong, saying what has been in BC literature

00:07:54.340 underlying all of this. So there's no new thoughts, there's no new concepts in this report.

00:08:00.480 Because obviously, you know, there's, when you're legalizing people smoking meth in playgrounds,

00:08:07.400 you know, there's, there's some kind of insane ideology underlying that. But it's weird to see

00:08:13.260 it now in this context, where plenty of very progressive people in BC have come around to the

00:08:19.700 idea of, you know, maybe it would be nice if our downtowns weren't exclusively filled with drug use

00:08:25.060 all the time. Maybe there is a role. Because we all know someone, we, I mean, we all know someone who

00:08:31.260 has had their life consumed by addiction, and we all usually know someone, well, they were an alcoholic,

00:08:36.180 we were on pills, they came out of the oil patch, you know, addicted to something. We know it's

00:08:41.900 possible for people to get clean. It doesn't need to be palliative care. And that's what it is. I mean,

00:08:47.880 at the extremes of BC harm reduction is, okay, you're on drugs, we'll make the drug doing as safe

00:08:53.060 as possible, which puts you in a low barrier hotel, we'll make sure clinicians watch you as you shoot up.

00:08:57.880 But that is your life. You're just sort of kept alive as a drug addict forever in perpetuity.

00:09:04.320 But anyway, yeah, yeah, the BC Human Rights Commissioner says all the lines that have

00:09:09.520 fueled all of this. I mean, this was this was what would have been said when in the earliest days

00:09:14.740 of insight, this is what was said when you were having a safer supply passed. And it's weird to

00:09:20.140 see all these arguments now, knowing what we know, knowing that we've leaned harder into harm

00:09:24.800 reduction than any other jurisdiction on the planet Earth. And all we've seen is overdose rates

00:09:30.080 rise. And the BC Human Rights Commissioner learned absolutely nothing. The last five years have not

00:09:35.480 happened to her. And we just get a report saying, Oh, this is all colonialist racist, the you know,

00:09:40.260 she doesn't, she says, we shouldn't even use the term overdose. It's, it's a toxic drug crisis,

00:09:45.700 because it's safe to do drugs. It's just all the additives that all the criminals are putting in.

00:09:49.900 And there's no role for law enforcement. So I mean, I just wrote about it because it is sort of

00:09:57.540 indicative. We're all having experiences lately, where there's a Supreme Court decision, like,

00:10:03.460 I'm sorry, putting a pedophile in prison is cruel, unusual punishment. What are you even talking about?

00:10:08.100 And it is sort of illustrative of at very high and elite echelons and very well paid echelons.

00:10:13.840 The BC Human Rights Commissioner gets 350,000 per year. She's one of the most

00:10:17.220 highly paid bureaucrats in the BC system. You can just release a 22 page report,

00:10:22.700 very disconnected from any kind of modern reality. And there's no one in the office

00:10:29.060 to sort of say why that might be a bad idea.

00:10:32.720 Yeah, I mean, Kassari Govender makes Premier Evie look like a moderate. 1.00

00:10:38.880 Yeah, he's I mean, we pay our premiers pretty well, I think as a BC premier, Alberta is that they've

00:10:44.620 always been the most high paid premier, it's kind of a prestigious thing, but the two hundred twenty

00:10:49.220 one thousand, not bad. And yeah, you're looking at 350,000 for the BC Human Rights Commissioner,

00:10:57.040 which is different for the BC Human Rights Tribunal. That's the one where, you know,

00:11:01.500 you take someone to a quasi judicial thing. So they are separate agencies. So the Human Rights

00:11:06.720 Commissioner is just, you know, will intervene on some cases. But this is essentially what the

00:11:13.300 office does. And it's eight million dollars a year to release position statements like this saying,

00:11:18.300 you know, stigmatizing drug use. Have you considered that that's actually colonialist and racist?

00:11:24.820 My favorite part of your column, as you referenced the report, was the fact that even

00:11:29.660 the mere act of talking about it really is discriminatory. Let's go read your part of this.

00:11:36.180 According to the commissioner, the discussing the overdose crisis implies that doing drugs such

00:11:43.120 as meth or fentanyl is inherently safe. Well, it certainly turned out to be unsafe for the 16,000

00:11:49.040 people or so who overdosed in British Columbia since 2016. Yeah. And the argument and then, I mean,

00:11:54.700 still official government terms. I mean, it is referred to in coroner's reports as the toxic drug

00:12:01.840 crisis, which I mean, the root of that is the idea that you can do these drugs safely. And that is said

00:12:09.700 directly in the BC Human Rights Commissioner's report. I mean, they're being as safe as possible.

00:12:14.120 If we just had systems and supports, they could just do drugs recreationally, and this would be

00:12:18.980 totally fine. And people don't believe me when I say that when I say, oh, no, the people in charge

00:12:23.660 of the drug, they do have the foundational ideology is that you can do hard drugs, and it's totally fine.

00:12:31.700 And it's a lifestyle choice. I mean, that sounds crazy. I still think there's a lot of British 1.00

00:12:36.500 Colombians who haven't accepted that that is the idea at the core of all of this. 0.95

00:12:42.120 But yeah, it's brought up in this report. And the idea is it's the toxic drug crisis,

00:12:46.380 because they're only dying of overdoses, because they're otherwise safe drug consumption.

00:12:51.800 Because they had to buy their drugs from the black market, they weren't getting the pure stuff.

00:12:56.760 So it's, I guess, if you were to make a similar argument doing prohibition, it's like, well,

00:13:01.440 the alcohol is totally fine for you under any context. Alcoholism doesn't even exist.

00:13:05.920 It's just that we have some booze that is tainted with, you know, antifreeze. And if we can just get

00:13:11.960 everybody drinking the pure alcohol, alcohol is 100% fine, and there's no problems with it.

00:13:18.240 But she wants the government to adopt policies to push it more towards decriminalizing, right? 0.98

00:13:23.740 To basically normalizing.

00:13:25.440 Yes, yes. So as as the government is saying, okay, we keep doing this, because I mean, I would ask people

00:13:31.580 just to, I mean, we've had more shipments of fentanyl, I guess that's one outside force that

00:13:35.980 has defined this. But 10 years ago, you know, wasn't too long ago, when we had much lower rates of

00:13:41.300 overdose. I'm the numbers escape me, but it's exponentially higher now than it was 10 years ago,

00:13:47.620 when we were already calling it a crisis. The amount of harm reduction we had, then was much lower

00:13:53.780 than now. I mean, now it's normalized that everyone from security guards to hospital

00:13:59.720 tenants to pharmacies have naloxone kits on that that didn't exist 10 years ago. You had a handful

00:14:05.580 of safe injection sites. Now any midsize community anywhere in the country has multiple safe consumption

00:14:11.340 sites. You have low barrier shelters. You have the safer supply system. And as I often remind people,

00:14:18.760 this is very unique to us. Although harm reduction was pioneered as a European idea,

00:14:26.040 the amount that we've sort of leaned into it, this doesn't exist in any sort of a European or

00:14:32.420 American context. I mean, we're at the leading edge of doing this. And each one of these reforms that

00:14:38.500 we implement, it's just meaning more and more people are dying of drug overdoses. So if you're just

00:14:45.640 looking, and you know, if someone was here, they would scream at me and say it's more complicated,

00:14:50.080 more nuanced, but you know, lots of harm reduction has correlated pretty closely with overdose

00:14:58.360 rates remaining high. So it's been 10 years of trying harm reduction. Everything we do seems to

00:15:06.100 make things worse. And she's saying, again, this is not particularly unique to her. This has been the

00:15:12.580 case within many pro-harm reduction circles, including many public health bodies. It was

00:15:17.900 only a couple of years ago that you had the provincial health officer, Bonnie Henry, 0.58

00:15:22.000 doing her review of safe supply. And this was one of the first government reports to acknowledge that

00:15:27.300 diversion was happening. They denied it before then. They'd said it was misinformation. And then

00:15:32.400 police started coming out and saying, we keep doing drug busts that are mostly safer supply,

00:15:37.440 a diverted safer supply. So it became too hard to ignore. And then you had the provincial health

00:15:42.600 officer, Bonnie Henry saying, the only reason this is happening is because the drugs aren't strong

00:15:47.680 enough. So you had a review of safer supply and Bonnie Henry herself, provincial health officer, 0.77

00:15:52.700 our top doctor essentially saying, okay, well, instead of hydromorphone, we need to start giving

00:15:58.620 out fentanyl and smokable fentanyl. And we need to start putting it in rural areas where it may not be,

00:16:04.660 you know, you can get, you can get your drugs in the big city. We need to start sending just trucks

00:16:09.040 of smokable fentanyl into first nations communities. Uh, that's the only way to sort of

00:16:13.600 stop the overdose crisis. So again, the, uh, BC human rights commissioner is not, um, I guess out

00:16:21.220 of line. Uh, I mean, there's, there's plenty of sort of people making more than $200,000 in the BC

00:16:26.360 government that sort of share these sentiments, but I guess, um, her rapport is unique in that it's,

00:16:33.100 uh, there's almost no consideration that drugs are inherently bad, or there is a role for law

00:16:40.620 enforcement in some context, which I think, um, even a lot of very progressive lefty, uh, British

00:16:47.560 Colombians are starting to come around to, um, you know, they remember that you used to be able to

00:16:52.440 ride public buses and there wasn't a guy tweaking out on meth.

00:16:55.560 Yeah. I mean, it, it almost makes you think there's a correlation between the amount of money

00:17:01.480 these people are making and just how out of touch they are with reality. I mean, they advocate the,

00:17:07.340 the distribution of free recreational opioids, you know, to drug users, you know, better access to

00:17:15.080 quote unquote, safe supply. I mean, how is this playing with the regular folks? You know,

00:17:21.680 one thing I will, um, that, that sort of strikes me about these types of reports is you'll see,

00:17:26.200 well, the whole, you know, why are people taking drugs? And they'll say, well, it's the history of

00:17:29.380 colonialism and racism and stuff. So you'll see often references to, uh, you know, indigenous people

00:17:35.880 are hardest hit by this and it's because of colonialism and it's because of all this is causing

00:17:39.780 this. You actually ask indigenous communities who are hardest hit by the overdose crisis. I mean,

00:17:44.520 however, it's hitting the general population and it's, we're one of the highest places in the world

00:17:48.920 for people dying of drug overdoses. It's exponentially higher in first nations

00:17:53.020 communities. Um, what you are seeing in a lot of reserves is, um, you know, you drive into the

00:17:59.720 reserve and there's a big sign saying drug dealers are not welcome. Um, community is exploring

00:18:04.480 banishment. Um, you know, there was, there was an incident, uh, I'm forgetting if it was a few months

00:18:10.820 ago or a year ago, uh, where there was sort of a notorious drug dealer on Haida Gwaii and he was

00:18:16.220 actually exiled from the community. And as he was on the mainland, people were meeting him,

00:18:20.720 you know, people were sort of messaging each other on Facebook, you know, this notorious drug dealer,

00:18:24.860 make sure he can't stop for gas. Just, just keep hustling them out. So he never comes back. Um, so

00:18:30.420 you have the hardest hit communities by this or advocating the old fashioned drugs are bad. We

00:18:36.980 should stop people from selling drugs in our communities. We should disincentivize the

00:18:41.460 normalize eight. We should go back to stigmatizing drug use. Um, and there's just no acknowledgement

00:18:46.660 whatsoever from the BC human rights commissioner. I, I, I, I, I can't imagine if you went to just

00:18:54.340 sort of go to your hardest hit indigenous drug community, get all the elders together and, you

00:18:59.380 know, try and explain to them that your solution is, uh, actually we need more drugs supplied by the

00:19:05.420 governments, you know, with fewer safeguards. I don't think it would go over well. I don't think

00:19:11.400 so either. Now there are national implications to what's going on in British Columbia, right? As you

00:19:16.180 mentioned, BC has kind of, kind of led the way with the decriminalizing stuff. Yes. And, you know,

00:19:22.480 Ontario is looking on, you know, Quebec is looking at what's, what's going on. So maybe talk a little

00:19:28.420 bit about that, you know, what's the likelihood that a report like this will have ramifications

00:19:33.980 outside of BC? Uh, I, I don't know probably in, uh, again, there's nothing in it that's

00:19:42.100 particularly unique. I mean, she's just sort of recycling ideas that have been at the fringes,

00:19:46.540 uh, but you know, the mainstream fringes, I mean, I call them fringe, uh, but they are very much at

00:19:51.820 the mainstream. I mean, you can read these ideas, uh, in reports guiding, you know, federal and BC

00:19:57.440 drug policy for, for years. Um, it is, I mean, this is sort of my beat at the national post

00:20:03.500 is I'll cover sort of, you know, how inst institutions that have been captured by ideology.

00:20:09.640 So, you know, the Canadian armed forces puts up a report saying that Canadian society is

00:20:13.900 systemically racist and any unequal outcome is, you know, but I'd say in, in, in drug policy,

00:20:19.740 it still surprises me when I will be reading a high level reports, you know, signed on by any number

00:20:25.360 of doctors with immense power over how public health, and you will see these ideas, uh, that,

00:20:31.120 that seem crazy to the normal person, the, the idea that, um, uh, getting off drugs, getting

00:20:38.040 clean from drugs is not a realistic or even desirable outcome. Um, uh, but in terms of implications,

00:20:46.300 I, I don't know because BC did lead the way, uh, it wasn't too long ago that BC was the only

00:20:52.840 place in Canada that had safe consumption sites and they pioneered a model. The inside people put

00:20:58.480 out a bunch of extremely dodgy data, um, claiming that, oh, you know, safe injection sites makes

00:21:05.320 make neighborhoods safer. It reduces drug overdoses. And I've written extensively about the data that

00:21:10.860 they released showing that it's incredibly dodgy data sucks. Um, but I mean, the reason you live in

00:21:17.320 the community, be it in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Quebec, um, in which you are walking distance,

00:21:22.600 uh, to a safe consumption site or a low barrier shelter or whatever, any of these sort of temples

00:21:27.940 of harm reduction. And if you're listening to this, you almost certainly do is because of models that

00:21:33.880 were pioneered by BC. Um, but on, if BC is becoming skeptical of the effectiveness of these models,

00:21:41.320 um, I think maybe we're past the era, uh, where people look to BC as a model of what to do. Um,

00:21:49.000 however, um, I guess what we can learn from this report is if you can have people in high echelons

00:21:54.840 of power making $350,000 a year, who can be so disconnected from reality, maybe your own province

00:22:01.240 also has people that disconnected from reality. And if there's no pushback, maybe they will pursue these

00:22:06.920 ideas. And speaking of pushback, will there be any from, from David Eby from, from the premier or how

00:22:13.480 does he treat this? Because, you know, a lot of people, I think in his, maybe you want to say far

00:22:18.840 left base, probably think that this is the best thing possible for BC and anyone else.

00:22:24.440 Eby sort of, uh, he's interesting on these files because his background is as a, he was a street

00:22:30.920 level activist lawyer, um, for, for groups like the Pivot Legal Society, you know, who were very

00:22:36.680 instrumental in, you know, the, the quote unquote lawfare that enabled, uh, whole communities to

00:22:43.720 sort of be roped off as drug doing areas. Um, so in his younger life, he was very much at the front

00:22:49.240 lines of ideas like this. Um, so it's, it's, uh, it's strange to see how David Eby reacts to these

00:22:56.280 because, uh, on the one hand, um, he's looking at systems that he personally helped implement

00:23:01.240 as a younger man. Uh, but he also has sort of a visceral, um, appreciation of how extreme and how

00:23:09.320 crazy those groups can get. Uh, so we will see sort of a, this isn't the most PC term, but we'll see

00:23:15.000 sort of a schizophrenic view of David Eby. Well, he, and on the one hand, he will do things like

00:23:21.160 repeat the nostrums that, you know, we have to reduce stigma, et cetera. Um, but at the same time,

00:23:27.560 he will sort of come out with, with ideas that are very controversial within the far left of his

00:23:33.080 party, uh, like, um, involuntary care and treatment. Um, uh, he, he, he was pushing that, uh, I think

00:23:41.000 when he was first running for BC leader, he sort of came out and said, you know, if we can't just have

00:23:45.320 people, uh, you know, doing drugs with, I mean, you have to take, if someone is like within two weeks

00:23:51.320 of just overdosing, they're completely, they, we have to put them in an institution and forcibly

00:23:55.800 get them clean. He was bringing this up for quite a while, but, uh, he also dialed that back, uh, when

00:24:02.440 his party started yelling at him. Um, so it's sort of hard to nail him down on this because you'll see

00:24:07.880 one interview with David Eby and you're like, oh, that sounds pretty reasonable. That sounds like

00:24:10.840 something I would say. And then you'll see an official state from statement from the premier's

00:24:14.200 office saying we have to decriminalize people who use drugs, harm reduction is the way forward,

00:24:17.480 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, so perhaps that is a representation of BC as a whole, but, um,

00:24:26.200 right now, uh, when I see David Eby speaking of drug policy, um, lately, it's usually to say,

00:24:34.440 perhaps we've gone too far and we should dial back and we should arrest drug dealers more than we have

00:24:40.440 been doing. Now, this has been an issue on the federal scene. Uh, it played out, uh, there was

00:24:47.160 discussions around it during the campaign. For instance, uh, Carney said something about,

00:24:53.560 well, we don't really have a crisis in terms of opiate, uh, overdosing. And then all you have

00:25:00.360 skewered him saying we've had 50,000 people die probably. What is it now? 60,000? I don't know.

00:25:06.360 It must be up. Uh, federally, I think it's 53,000 since, uh, one, one problem is we just, our,

00:25:11.960 our data sucks on this. Um, so this is one thing that comes up in the BC human rights commissioners

00:25:16.200 report. She she'll claim, and this is technically legalistically true. She'll say, well, there's no

00:25:21.080 evidence to show that, you know, having tons of government supplied opioids is increasing

00:25:27.160 overdose deaths. The reason we don't have evidence is because they're not looking for it. The only

00:25:31.000 metric they're using to determine whether it's having deleterious effects on public health is

00:25:36.680 it wasn't showing up in a lot of autopsies of overdose victims. That was the only metric they

00:25:41.640 were checking. Now a normal person would say, well, if you're trying to see if, uh, you know,

00:25:46.600 high schoolers are getting more addicted. I mean, there's a bunch of different things you could

00:25:50.600 possibly check. There are surveys, uh, there are toxicology tests, you know, someone shows up in

00:25:54.840 the hospital. If you're just looking at whether it's in the corpses of people who have died, um,

00:26:00.280 that may not be the best representation of the overall harm this might be doing. But, um,

00:26:05.160 I forget where you're going with that. Um, yeah. So anyway, it is, yeah. 50 to 60,000. Uh,

00:26:10.280 I mean, our life expectancy has plateaued, uh, in this country. That's the first time that's happened

00:26:16.280 basically ever, uh, where we just life expectancy is going up every single year with a few extra

00:26:21.080 months of life made has contributed, but it's primarily the overdose crisis. You're taking

00:26:25.560 people at the prime of their life and killing them. Um, so yes, our, and in terms of countries,

00:26:31.880 I think the only country whose rate is worse than us is Scotland. Um, so if you take the UK as a whole,

00:26:37.880 it's, it's lower, but I mean, we are one of the places where it's most likely that you will die

00:26:43.080 of a drug overdose. Incredible. Well, I, if the government doesn't have that data,

00:26:48.360 it probably doesn't want that data. You know, it's probably, you know, reluctant to, to collect data

00:26:54.760 that will be a condemnation of their policies. So, yeah, we do have, uh, but, but again, you,

00:27:00.520 you see things like, I mean, they're called toxic drug deaths. Um, so we, we can't even acknowledge

00:27:05.960 that you can die, uh, of a drug overdose. So yeah, the toxic drug deaths are the sort

00:27:09.880 of 50,000 to 60,000 range over, I think 2016, since 2016. Tristan, thank you so much for coming

00:27:17.320 on the show. Congratulations on your terrific work at the national post. Thank you. Tristan Hopper.

00:27:23.320 And that is it for this edition of straight up. Appreciate you tuning in my friends. Let's do it

00:27:27.480 again real soon, shall we? Bye bye for now.

Juno News - November 18, 2025

Carney’s budget NARROWLY PASSES + B.C. calls drug stigma “colonialist”

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