Thank you, committee members, for this opportunity to speak with you today.

I was sworn in as an RCMP officer in 1996. The 28-year career that followed was spent policing in the province of British Columbia.

In August of this year, I retired from the position of officer in charge of the Prince George RCMP detachment, a position I'd held for the previous five years. For committee members who may not be familiar with the geography of northern British Columbia, Prince George is a city with a population of approximately 80,000 people. It is far larger than any other municipality in the northern half of the province and is approximately a six-hour drive from a community of similar size. It is a hub city for goods and services for a large portion of the province. As a result, there is a significant transient population that contributes to social disorder issues.

During my policing career, there were two public policy issues that I observed to have overarching impacts on the area of social disorder in our communities.

The first of those issues was already occurring in the 1990s, when I became a police officer. That was the shift towards treating significant mental health issues in the community rather than in mental health institutions. Unfortunately, the supports provided in the community were either insufficient or inadequate to properly address the complex mental health needs of many individuals. This has contributed to those individuals being involved in criminal activity and incidents of social disorder over the last several decades.

The second issue is the decriminalization of hard drugs introduced in the province of British Columbia in 2023. During the first year of decriminalization, complaints of social disorder in the city increased noticeably. It appears to me that many aspects of this policy mirror the failings of mental health policy, since appropriate resources to facilitate treatment are not in place. There is a significant lack of treatment options available, and the majority of initiatives in this area focus primarily on facilitating the use of drugs, with little focus on prevention or providing assistance to individuals to get out of the cycle of addiction. This is similar to persons with complex mental health needs who are left on their own in society and who are unable to seek out and maintain appropriate care on their own. I have seen very few cases where opioid addicts have made rational decisions to seek treatment to overcome their addiction. There are many services readily available that actively facilitate drug use, but little focus on treatment.

One of the strategies introduced to address opioid addiction is the so-called safe supply of prescribed opioids. The practice of prescribing a quantity of pills for individuals to take away and use at their own discretion is problematic. Many of those prescribed pills are traded in or sold to the illicit drug market by individuals seeking more potent street drugs. This often occurs outside the door of a pharmacy immediately after the prescribed pills are provided to the individual. Those prescribed pills are often seized alongside quantities of street drugs like fentanyl during police investigations.

When I began as a police officer in the 1990s, there was a focus on a four-pillar drug strategy, which consisted of prevention, enforcement, treatment and harm reduction. It is my experience that the only pillar of this strategy now being supported significantly is harm reduction. With decriminalization establishing drug addiction as solely a health care matter, it's my observation that the majority of the resources focus on accepting and facilitating drug addiction and its associated behaviours as a social norm, without a focus on preventing and reducing rates of addiction. As a result, it appears to me that the harms of illicit drugs on society have continued to increase.

Thank you.