Mr. Speaker, opioids are an important issue.

I personally happen to know a lot about the bill, because prior to becoming a politician, I had a medical device company, and we spent a lot of time developing pain management products and pain management devices. Many times people confuse devices with pharmaceuticals. I did not do pharmaceuticals. I did devices.

In that light, I had the opportunity to travel around the world to meet pain management specialists from many countries and understand the challenges faced by people who suffer from pain. What we strove to do was give people an alternative to opioids. Specifically, when it comes to palliative care issues, there could be opioid problems where someone is going to die. This happens a lot with some types of bone cancer, for example. It can be excruciatingly painful in the last six months, and people are then in a position of spending their lives drugged up, or they could be offered alternative tools. This is something that, as electrical engineers specializing in biomedical products, we worked to develop. I am happy to say that we were very successful around the world offering people alternatives to opioids.

The danger of becoming addicted to opioids is very real, and we should be, and we are, searching for solutions. As we speak, tomorrow and the next day our minister is having meetings with stakeholders.

What often happens with these issues is that we think there is a simple solution, and it does look simple at first glance, but there are challenges. My concern is moving forward without hearing the stakeholders, without hearing from the other ministers of health, without hearing from the physicians I know, the experts, and people working with the United Nations to make pain management a universal right, the right to avoid pain. There is a lot of work being done in this area and it warrants listening to those experts before we undertake any bill.

I do not criticize the idea. In fact, the overall objective is a good one, and it is one our government takes extremely seriously: How do we help people not become addicted? If we are going to take action to stop certain people from becoming addicted, we need to make sure that we do not inadvertently push up the price or take off the market or make it difficult for people who need them to get access to these medicines. This is an important and dangerous challenge if not done right.

Addiction is a disease, and that should be understood. Many times we tend to think of the person who is addicted as being weak-willed or not having strong character, and that is incorrect. It is an addiction, and it is a problem. I stand here lucky enough not to suffer from pain, so I do not feel I am in any position to ever criticize people who inadvertently become addicted because they have been in chronic pain for a long time. I have seen that. I have had people who have undergone procedures with devices I have made and designed tell me how it has changed their lives to not live in pain.

I say that to let people know that never should we criticize a person who becomes addicted to opioids. By the same token, when we take action to help them, we need to make sure that those actions are going to give us the results we want. In life, unfortunately, we have the law of unintended consequences. We set out to do something and inadvertently cause another problem. This is why, on such an important issue, I believe that our Minister of Health is taking the proper holistic approach. I believe it is right to hear from all these experts to understand which medications are more likely to lead to addiction and which ones are not. What are the dangers involved? What type of approaches, technological and psychological, should be taken? Sometimes we tend to think that the answer is always technology. That is not always the case. Sometimes it is a combination of many things.

I strongly suggest that we take the time to take this holistic approach. We listen to the experts from government. We listen to the experts from the medical field. We understand the challenges, and we move forward with a comprehensive approach while ensuring that we are monitoring the situation so we do not inadvertently cause a problem that we then try to backpedal on. Unfortunately, with addiction, if we do it wrong, we might condemn more people to all sorts of problems. We might make more addicts. We might have all kinds of issues that come from that, so we need to be extremely careful as we move forward on this issue.

For this reason, I agree with our government that this bill in its present form at this time is not ready to be supported. I do not say that it is a bad idea. I actually encourage the member for the thought process, and it is wonderful that we are talking about it. However, I want to move forward intelligently and very carefully. When we are talking about someone's health, if we get it wrong, there are serious consequences.

We stand here in the House of Commons many times and talk about this and that and joke around at times. Sometimes we insult and taunt each other. I do not agree with any of that, and I do not get into it. When we talk about bills of this nature that would actually impact someone's life, I always tell people that the person could be my mother, could be their brother, or could be someone's son or daughter. If we are cavalier about these things and we get it wrong, there are real consequences from these types of medical bills.

For this reason, I am always going to err on the side of caution and going forward intelligently and safely, because getting it wrong, I have seen. I have been in cases where patients have died from errors. This happens. We do not like to think about it. We do not like to believe it. It happens. Doctors, nurses, and patients are all human beings. They do not always get it right. In this instance, not getting it right can mean, in the worst case, death. It does happen. I have been there. I have seen it.

I strongly suggest, as we look to move forward, that we talk to everyone. Even when we do all that, it does not guarantee that we will get it right, but it would tell us that we did everything possible to get it right. That is all we can do in the end. We cannot do more than that. On these important issues, we can take the politics out of it. We can say that this is too important to play games. We play games in a lot of things, but in matters such as this, where it would impact people's lives, we take that responsibility as parliamentarians and representatives of our country extremely seriously.

That is why I am strongly suggesting that we go through the proper process and hear the experts. This is no guarantee that we will get it right, but we will have done everything possible to have done so.

Frank Baylis

Transcript

Private Members' Business

Discussions (0)