Close to 51,000 Canadians died from apparent opioid toxicity between January 2016 and September 2024, making the unregulated toxic drug supply one of the most pressing health issues in Canada.
For context, that’s nearly 16,000 more Canadians than were killed in the Second World War, and more than double the number of people killed in Canada by AIDS.
The spike in deaths began when the synthetic opioid fentanyl began to appear in illicit drugs sold on the street starting around 2014. Fentanyl can be relatively cheaply manufactured locally and is 20 to 40 times more potent than heroin. The illicit, unregulated supply has only become more unpredictable and deadly since.
Over the last decade there’s been a push in Canada to move addiction away from the realm of the criminal — what is often referred to as the “war on drugs” — and to recognize it as a public health problem. Broadly speaking, that means that instead of arresting people who use drugs for possession, doctors and advocates have pushed for people who use drugs to be able to access evidence-based harm reduction interventions, opioid agonist therapy and, in some cases, safer, predictable prescription drugs such as hydromorphone or benzodiazepines.
Today, however, the move away from the “war on drugs” seems to be in flux.
There’s widespread discontent in the visible increase in homelessness, mental health crises and drug use across the country, with people on the left criticizing the government for not rolling out more accessible harm reduction programs and housing solutions and people on the right calling for involuntary treatment and increased criminal sentences for drug-related offences.
As The Tyee waits for official platforms to drop, we take a look at how each federal party has been framing the crisis and fact check some of their proposed policies.
This article won’t be covering Bloc Québécois because the party doesn’t table policies that directly affect British Columbians.
The Liberal Party of Canada
The Liberals’ 2021 platform promised to introduce a comprehensive strategy to end the opioid crisis, invest $25 million in public education to reduce stigma, invest $500 million to support provinces and territories in providing evidence-based treatment, create standards for treatment programs and reform the Criminal Code to repeal mandatory minimum penalties for substance use-related infractions to keep lower-risk and first-time offenders out of the criminal justice system.
DJ Larkin, executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, says that while the Liberals had some early commitments to evidence-based policy reform, such as support for decriminalization and prescribed alternatives, things fell flat because there was no followup.
The Liberals didn’t bother to explain what decriminalization or safer supply was, “or help the public understand and combat some of the misinformation around how those programs work,” Larkin said.
Funding ‘goes towards enforcement efforts’
In October 2023 the federal government released its Canadian Drugs and Substances Strategy, in which the “preponderance of funding goes towards enforcement efforts, with very little going towards harm reduction,” Larkin said.
Funding for “treatment” seems to go towards research and prison-based health care, Larkin added, noting “it’s quite unclear the extent to which they’ve really made that investment.”
Limited decriminalization
Health Canada supported B.C.’s request to implement a decriminalization pilot project in January 2023, and then-party leader Justin Trudeau said the government would support other provincial or territorial decisions implementing similar programs.
But in 2022, Health Canada denied the Drug User Liberation Front’s request for an exemption under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, which DULF had sought so it could buy, test and sell drugs at cost through its compassion club safer supply project.
From a policy perspective this was a “huge error,” Larkin said. The request was “well supported by evidence, it was well thought out and it was very well structured.” The exemption could have been a “huge turning point” in the crisis and would have helped generate evidence for how a compassion club model of safer supply distribution worked, Larkin said.
DULF asked pharmaceutical companies if it could buy pharmaceutical-grade drugs from them but was told it had to get permission from Health Canada first. When that permission was denied, DULF was punished for buying drugs illegally.
Harm reduction, treatment funding
In 2022 the federal government announced a $40-million investment for 73 community-led projects across Canada that focused on “evidence-informed” prevention, harm reduction and treatment.
It also invested $150 million over three years for an Emergency Treatment Fund in 2024, which helped municipalities and Indigenous communities respond to issues around substance use and overdoses.
The government has not yet published standards for treatment programs, something former chief coroner Lisa Lapointe emphasized a need for.
Larkin said the treatment industry has a “total lack of transparency,” where it’s not known how much a private facility is charging, what its policies are, what happens when someone is discharged or if they’re allowed to be on opioid agonist treatment.
The Conservative Party of Canada
The 2025 Conservative stance on drugs is dramatically different from the party’s 2021 platform, in which the party supported widespread distribution of naloxone, building 1,000 treatment beds and treating “the opioid epidemic as the health issue that it is.”
Back to criminalization
This time around, the party is framing the crisis as a criminal issue and promoting abstinence-only treatment while working to shut down harm reduction programs across the country.
Poilievre is “going back to criminalization” by proposing heavy criminal sentences for fentanyl and calling supervised consumption sites “drug dens,” Larkin said. This term has racist origins in 1907-era Vancouver, where Chinese and Japanese businesses were called “opium dens,” they added.
None of this rhetoric has been shown to decrease toxic drug deaths, Larkin said.
On April 6, Poilievre said he would prevent provinces and territories from opening overdose prevention sites, fire bureaucrats who support prescribed alternatives, introduce abstinence-only treatment and cut funding to federal supervised consumption sites and prescribed alternatives programs, according to the Globe and Mail.
Mandatory life sentences for amounts equivalent to less than half a baby Aspirin
In February, Poilievre said he’d introduce mandatory life sentences for anyone caught with 40 milligrams of fentanyl.
That’s “absurd,” said Leslie McBain, who co-founded Moms Stop the Harm after her son Jordan died from toxic drugs in 2014.
Forty milligrams is smaller than half a baby Aspirin, less than one-fifth of what someone with a regular fentanyl habit might use in a day, and 1.6 per cent of what a person can legally have to use in their own residence, a legal shelter or an overdose prevention site under B.C.’s decriminalization.
When it was first introduced, even the BC Association of Chiefs of Police gave decriminalization and its 2.5-gram limit the stamp of approval, saying that’s what a person who uses drugs might carry around for personal use.
The Tyee asked the association what it thought of the 40-milligram policy but did not hear back by press time.
McBain said many people sell drugs to fuel their own habit, not because they’re some “hardened criminal.”
Preventing the opening of overdose prevention sites — an unconstitutional promise?
When it comes to Poilievre’s promise to prevent provinces and territories from opening overdose prevention sites, he could do that if he lets an exemption under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act expire in September, said M-J Milloy, an associate professor in the University of British Columbia department of medicine. The exemption is what gives provincial health officers the authority to open overdose prevention sites.
Stephen Harper tried to do the same thing in 2008 and in 2011 was ordered by the Supreme Court of Canada to grant the exemption because ending it would be unconstitutional.
B.C. currently has 39 overdose prevention sites, four supervised consumption sites (which are under federal jurisdiction) and additional unsanctioned sites being operated by doctors volunteering their time.
The day after Poilievre said he’d close the sites down, B.C. Health Minister Josie Osborne said she would not let a federal government shut down “life-saving overdose prevention sites.”
Governments can also “choke” the funding of harm reduction sites to close them down, as the Albertan and Ontarian governments have done, Milloy said.
Health Canada says more than 488,400 Canadians visited supervised consumption sites more than 5,103,000 times between January 2017 and November 2024, with 62,200 non-fatal overdoses and more than half a million referrals to drug treatment, rehabilitation and other health services, or referrals to social services like housing or employment supports.
Firing bureaucrats
Poilievre’s promise to fire bureaucrats who support safer supply would be difficult, Milloy said, because public service workers at the federal and provincial levels are unionized and protected by collective bargaining agreements and well-established labour rights.
Safer supply pilot projects rolled out through Health Canada and non-government initiatives have shown the program reduced participants’ risk of overdose and death, improved their health and well-being and helped participants stabilize their lives.
McBain said the BC Coroners Service has consistently said fentanyl is killing people — not hydromorphone, which is commonly prescribed for safer supply.
Around 3,900 British Columbians are being prescribed safer supply out of the 100,000 British Columbians estimated to have opioid use disorder.
Does Poilievre’s math on treatment add up?
On April 6, Poilievre said he’d fund treatment for 50,000 Canadians by defunding safer supply and supervised consumption sites and suing opioid manufacturers.
A Canada-wide lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies that downplayed the risks of opioids is already underway.
Funding for treatment would be “results-based,” where “organizations are going to be paid a set fee for the number of months they keep addicts drug-free,” Poilievre said, according to the Globe and Mail.
Abstinence-based treatment can be dangerous because opioid use disorder is a chronic relapsing disease, meaning people will generally cycle in and out of substance use in their life, Milloy said. Most people will go to treatment a number of times before they achieve periods of lasting sobriety, he added.
When a person stops using opioids, their body starts to lose its high tolerance for the drug in as little as three days, meaning they’re at much higher risk of overdose when they use again.
Opioid agonist treatment is considered the gold-standard treatment for opioid use disorder, but it’s not clear if it would be allowed under Poilievre’s definition of “drug-free.”
“Simply detoxing individuals and putting them into a 12-step program, which is what the majority of recovery houses do, is not recommended because of the risk of death,” Milloy said.
Poilievre said each patient would get around $20,000 for treatment, for a total of $1 billion in funding. The party’s 2021 platform pledged $325 million over three years to fund 1,000 treatment beds, meaning there was $325,000 per bed.
The B.C. Ministry of Health said in an email it currently has 3,751 publicly funded treatment beds and the cost of a single patient’s treatment is between $20,000 and $183,000 per year.
The New Democratic Party
In its 2021 platform the NDP said it would declare a national public health emergency, “end the criminalization and stigma of drug addiction,” create a national medically regulated safer supply program, support overdose prevention sites, expand access to treatment on demand and launch an investigation into the role of pharmaceutical companies in the current crisis.
Drugs not on the party’s radar
For the last two years drugs haven’t been on the NDP’s radar. The party puts out a press release roughly every two days, and the last one that directly addressed the toxic drug crisis was in November 2023, marking National Addictions Awareness Week. The party didn’t mark the week in 2024.
Defeated private member’s bill
Shortly after the 2021 election, NDP mental health and harm reduction critic Gord Johns tabled a private member’s bill to decriminalize certain substances nationally and to expunge certain drug-related convictions, but it was defeated.
The Green Party of Canada
As part of its 2021 platform, the Green Party of Canada said it would declare a national public health emergency, legislate decriminalization for personal possession and all use of drugs, increase funding for community drug checking, implement a national education and distribution program for naloxone and create a national safer supply program for “drugs of choice.” A regular criticism of safer supply from people who use drugs is that it offers a limited number of pharmaceuticals that often aren’t able to replace the unregulated substances people use. This policy would have addressed that issue.
Larkin said it was a “very good sign” that the Greens’ platform recognized the intersectionality and nuance of the crisis and promoted programs and policies that are “supported by considerable academic evidence,” such as supervised consumption sites, decriminalization, prescribed alternatives and access to regulated treatment.
No current drug-related policies
The Greens don’t currently have drug-related policies on their website. But in August 2024 the party put out a press release calling for Canada to adopt an evidence-based approach by offering safer supply, safe consumption sites and barrier-free regulated treatment facilities, integrating pharmacare and mental health care in Canada’s universal health care, increased harm reduction services and action to address poverty and homelessness like guaranteed livable income and affordable and accessible housing.
