Thank you for having me. I lost my daughter two years ago to this opioid crisis. I fought for the last two years to save her life, and I failed. She was able to get safe supply with just one click on Snapchat, and she would be able to get any drug she wanted within five minutes.

She was in and out of the hospital for the last two years of her life. Her first overdose was with fentanyl. The mental health team was called in to give a report, said she was okay, and within five minutes she was released from the hospital. My daughter was suffering from ADHD. When we did the lockdown for COVID, it took her out of her regular routine and she had no escape. She wasn't used to being confined for the entire day, so she started to go online more and more. At that point, she started to dabble. She started with marijuana, and then went to bars, which was the street Xanax, and then finally she was introduced to dillies. Being a naive father, when she would talk about going out for a dilly bar, I thought that was ice cream, so it never raised any concern for me. She would hang out at Dairy Queen with all of her friends. It progressed from there to the point where she had another overdose, almost a year to the day before she died. We had one year to save her, and we failed. Every time a youth counsellor would come in, they'd give me the same thing. She had to ask verbally for help. My daughter was stubborn. She would never ask anyone for help. As a father, I had to sit there and watch my daughter commit suicide for a year and I wasn't able to help her.

We would have drug counsellors come in to talk to her, and they would tell her that it was okay for her to continue to use marijuana. They took me right out of the picture. I could not control any substance my daughter took. In her mind, that gave her the right to keep on smoking marijuana, which put me in the hardest position of my life. Would I let her go onto the streets to get her marijuana, or would I become a drug dealer for my own daughter? I took the latter approach and started to sell, to give my daughter the marijuana she needed to make sure she was getting a safe amount.

But that wasn't good enough for her. She liked the pills. The ease with which she was able to get the pills was unbelievable. She would go to the local park, and she would have what they call safe supply within five minutes. She was embarrassed about doing it. She and her friends, after the second overdose, decided that they needed to stop, but they would not ask for professional help. She got to the point where she was embarrassed and she was an addict, so she started to hide it. She would wait until I went to sleep and then she would take her pill in her bed. I would be gone to work the next morning, so I would never see the effect of it, until I got that fateful phone call that she was found dead in her bedroom.

Since then, I've reached out and tried to figure out what went wrong. I've talked to MLAs. I've talked to the police. The police keep telling me they're handcuffed. I've talked to counsellors; they don't have enough resources. After my daughter died, one of her best friends overdosed two more times. Another best friend has overdosed three more times since her death. We finally got one of them into rehab after she finally reached out and asked for help. It took her a month and a half to find a bed.

For teenagers, a month and a half is a lifetime, especially when they're struggling with addiction. We could have lost that girl very quickly, because we do not have the funding to help these children overcome their addictions.

That's everything I have to say right now.

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