Mr. Speaker, it is great to see you in the Speaker's seat. As I said to you off camera, it has been a long time coming.

First and foremost, I want to send a huge thanks to the hard-working people of Cariboo—Prince George for once again placing their trust in me to represent them, now for the fourth time.

My time is short today, so I rise not only to respond to the Speech from the Throne but also to address and confront a national tragedy that is shattering lives and communities, Canada's opioid crisis. Since 2016, over 51,000 Canadians have died from opioid overdose. These are not just numbers; they are our loved ones who were stolen by a crisis fuelled by the proliferation of fentanyl, coupled with horrendous policies by both federal and provincial governments.

In British Columbia, overdose is now the leading cause of death for youths aged 10 to 18. This is unacceptable, yet in the Liberal Speech from the Throne there was not a single mention of this catastrophe. In 2,500 words, there was not a single reference to the opioid crisis killing thousands of Canadians every year. On average, 17 Canadians lose their life every day due to overdose, and those are just the numbers we know. Perhaps that is by design. After all, during his recent leadership race, our new Prime Minister stood before Canadians and said publicly that the overdose issue was a challenge, but not a crisis. As a matter of fact, he repeated it.

The opioid crisis has been exacerbated by the Liberal government's misguided drug policies and catch-and-release criminal justice reforms. These policies must be ended immediately. They have left our streets less safe and our communities more vulnerable. They are not saving any lives; they are just perpetuating addiction, with no end in sight.

The opioid epidemic is a public safety disaster. British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario account for 83% of all opioid deaths, but no community is spared, large or small. The opioid crisis knows no social boundaries. In fact, just this week, in my hometown of Williams Lake, the city council passed a motion to explore declaring a state of emergency in response to the rising incidents of vandalism, open drug use, fires in front of businesses, theft, public indecency, defecation and more. City councillor Scott Nelson said the following with respect to the crisis: “Things have gotten so crazy, [so bad,] so out of control. Our resources [as a community] are depleted in terms of what’s taken place”.

In the last two days, there have been on average 10 to 20, possibly even 30, overdoses each day. That is astonishing. It is not Vancouver or Toronto but a small community of 10,000 people. Look at what it is experiencing and what it has been forced to do after 10 years of failed Liberal policies. Addiction fuels crime, homelessness and social disorder, yet the Liberals have prioritized harm reduction at the expense of prevention and recovery.

The Liberal government's failure to address the opioid crisis in its Speech from the Throne, despite very briefly mentioning border security and fentanyl trafficking in an attempt to appease President Trump, ignores the economic and human toll of the opioid crisis and sends a clear signal to Canadians struggling with addiction that their new federal government could not care less about them.

Over the last 10 years, the Liberal government's failed drug policies have done nothing to curb deaths. British Columbia's 2023 decriminalization experiment, fully supported by the Liberal government, allows possession and public use of hard drugs like heroin, fentanyl and cocaine. Despite decriminalization's being marketed as a solution, B.C.'s overdose death rate is the highest in Canada. Public drug use has surged, straining communities and first responders.

We hear reports of needles scattered around parks, playgrounds and sidewalks. Kids playing soccer in the Lower Mainland have to dodge contaminated needles on the field. Safe consumption sites are allowed to operate right beside high schools, and in doing so are promoting open drug use to young and vulnerable Canadians and falsely marketing it as safe.

So-called safe supply programs are an absolute, abject disaster. Diversion of these drugs into the black market fuels the illegal drug trade, many experts have admitted, but the Liberal government has tried to cover it up for years, demeaning anyone for speaking their uncomfortable truths.

In November 2024, retired Prince George RCMP superintendent Shaun Wright testified on the opioid crisis at our parliamentary health committee. Mr. Wright, who has decades of experience in frontline policing, has said that the decriminalization experiment was “the most horrific failure of public policy” in the history of B.C.

This is the side of the decriminalization experiment that the Liberal politicians in the Ottawa bubble will not see, do not see and do not want us to understand or see. Our communities are unsafe, and our constituents feel unwelcome in their own neighbourhoods. The government must commit to not expanding the failed decriminalization experiment to anywhere else in Canada and to halting all attempts to bring forward legalization of deadly hard drugs, as some Liberals have suggested.

Furthermore, the $1 billion spent by the Liberals, as mentioned earlier by one of our colleagues, has solved nothing. What do we have to show for it? We have more deaths, more families torn apart, more communities on the brink of extinction and no hope in sight. I ask the member to take a look around their community. Does it look the same way as it did 10 years ago, before the first Liberal reign in 2015? It does not.

Treatment access remains severely limited, and supervised consumption sites simply do not address addiction's root causes. The throne speech was silent on the crisis. It missed a critical opportunity to prioritize treatment and recovery.

This baffles me a little, because we have had a plan to fight for recovery. In our Conservative platform, we highlighted how we would create 50,000 new beds for recovery to honour the 50,000 Canadians who have died from the crisis. The Liberals stole so many ideas from our plan: the GST cut on housing, income tax cuts, etc. I strongly encourage them to steal this plan as well and to get to work creating those 50,000 beds.

There is another side to the drug crisis as well. The Liberal government's criminal justice reforms, most notably Bill C-5, have made things many times worse. By eliminating mandatory minimum penalties for certain drug-related offences, Bill C-5 is a catch-and-release policy that lets traffickers off with nothing but a slap on the wrist.

In our communities, 98% of crime is committed by five or six prolific offenders in one of my communities, and by 30 in my largest community, Prince George. When they are in jail, the crime rate goes down. When they are out of jail, the crime rate goes up.

As a matter of fact, when one of my constituents, Bob Hubbard, returned home last fall, he found his house being looted by a group of drug addicts. He tried to stop them. While he was in the process, they ran him over with his own vehicle and left him for dead on the road. The perpetrators were caught the very same day, but within 24 hours after leaving Mr. Hubbard for dead on the road, they were out committing more crimes in our community. That is the reality we live in.

Businesses have also been broken into. Their windows are smashed and their doorways are set on fire so many times that owners cannot get the necessary insurance to operate their business, so they choose not to report these incidents or they close shop altogether, leaving the downtown core a ghost town. That is the reality after 10 years of Liberal government.

If the Speaker will indulge me, I have to leave with this. Canada's opioid crisis, with over 50,000 lives lost since 2016, is a tragedy ignored by the government's Speech from the Throne. In B.C., drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for youth aged 10 to 18. This is a tragedy that hits home when I think of 13-year-old Brianna MacDonald, who died alone from an overdose in a homeless encampment in Abbotsford late last August. Her story is a stark reminder of our failure to protect the most vulnerable.

As leaders, we must do better and be better.

This is not just a challenge; it is a crisis. It demands urgent action, not silence. The Prime Minister's policies have failed Canadians, and Canadians demand a system that supports recovery, punishes traffickers and restores safety.

Let us honour Brianna and the thousands lost in this city by fighting for a future where no more lives are lost.

Todd Doherty

$635,672.00