Budget good for NCN, but not enough for drug crisis

By Eric Plummer Ha-Shilth-Sa Editor

Ottawa, ON -All in all the federal government’s fiscal plan for this year presents a positive collection of initiatives to help the struggles of many Nuu-chahnulth people, says Courtenay-Alberni MP Gord Johns - although the spending measures fall short in tackling the opioid crisis.

Liberal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland presented the 2023 budget on March 28, a plan heavy on health care spending with a projected deficit of $40.1 billion over the next fiscal year.Approximately 70 per cent of the budget’s new spending is going towards health care, including a national dental program for those who don’t have coverage that alone accounts for $3.6 billion over the next year.

The budget was passed with the support of the NDP, and the dental coverage was included as part of the party’s agreement with the Liberals, who currently have a minority government.

“This was a significant amount of money that we negotiated to support this budget,” said Johns. “The dental care alone is the largest expansion of our healthcare system in over 50 years.”

Across Canada the availability of health care has fallen to critical levels. In British Columbia one in five residents are without a family doctor, forced to rely on walk in clinics and emergency rooms for medical treatment that would otherwise be routine. In Budget 2023 almost $200 billion is committed over the next decade to improve the health care system.

“Patients seeking emergency care have found their emergency rooms overwhelmed. Surgeries have been postponed or cancelled,” stated the budget’s overview. “Our public health care system, and the workers who uphold it, are under enormous strain—a situation that was made worse by the pandemic, and which requires immediate action to deliver better care for Canadians.”

The budget states that people in Canada are dying from drug overdoses at a rate of 20 per day. Six of these daily fatalities occur in B.C. alone, and Indigenous people are being affected at a rate five times greater than the rest of the population, according statistics from the First Nations HealthAuthority.

Seven years after the opioid crisis was declared a provincial public health emergency, Nuu-chah-nulth families are being hit with tragedy more than ever, including three men who died from illicit drug use in the span of a week in PortAlberni last month. Johns has long pushed for the toxic drug crisis to be given more attention in Ottawa, but this federal budget continues to show that the message is not coming through, he said.

Over the next five years $359.2 million is set aside for a drug and substances strategy that spans a wide array of programs. These include increasing a safer, prescribed supply of alternatives, supervised injection sites, measures to prevent drug use in young people, better enforcement to attack drug trafficking and more intensive lab analysis of what’s on the illicit market.

“This isn’t even one per cent of what they’ve spent on COVID-19,” commented Johns. “It’s not even close to a response that we would expect from a government in the middle of an epidemic.”

He noted that the “war on drugs” approach hasn’t worked anywhere in North America, as it criminalizes those who are already at the highest risk in using illicit