Ottawa, ON – The NDP-Liberals’ taxpayer-funded hard drugs experiment has been a disaster. Today, news reports confirmed what Conservatives have been saying for years, namely that a “significant portion” of taxpayer-funded drugs are ending up in the hands of organized crime and drug traffickers.
Despite Common Sense Conservatives ringing the alarm, the radical Liberal government and their NDP allies refused to listen. Liberal Mental Health Minister, Ya’ara Saks, said, “there is currently no evidence to support a widespread diversion of safer supply drugs.”
But this report shows that the NDP-Liberal Government was lying. According to these reports, a secret 38-page document from BC’s Ministry of Health warned their radical government that “a ‘significant portion’ of opioids prescribed by doctors and pharmacists in British Columbia are being diverted, and prescribed alternatives are being trafficked provincially, nationally and internationally.” On top of this, the amount of taxpayer-funded opioids being dispensed has “soared by about 20 times in recent years.”
This is not the first time the NDP-Liberal Government were warned about the disastrous consequences of their taxpayer-funded hard drug program. The Vancouver Police Department said last spring that around 50 percent of all hydromorphone seizures were diverted from the Liberals’ taxpayer-funded hard drugs program.
But this is not just happening in British Columbia. In Ontario, the Waterloo Regional Police Service and Niagara Regional Police Service revealed that since 2019, hydromorphone seizures have exploded by 1,090 percent and 1,577 percent, respectively.
Since 2016, 49,000 Canadians have died of opioid overdoses, representing a 200 percent increase in yearly deaths. The NDP-Liberal Government has also allowed Canada to become a drug-manufacturing hot spot, with “seizures of Canada-sourced fentanyl in places like the U.S. and Australia.”
The NDP-Liberal Government must finally accept that their taxpayer-funded hard drugs experiment has failed. Only Common Sense Conservatives will stop handing out taxpayer-funded hard drugs, impose mandatory life sentences on fentanyl kingpins, and invest in treatment and recovery to bring home our loved ones drug-free.