EDMONTON — This Tuesday in the Legislature, while responding to a question about significant concerns regarding the crown corporation CoRE (the Centre of Recovery Excellence), Minister of Mental Health and Addiction Rick Wilson spoke about a recent visit to a Supervised Consumption Site (SCS) and claimed that “these people that are in there: I’ve actually seen them collapse and die right in front of me,” along with a slew of other bizarre commentary on the issue.
“This is absolutely absurd. Minister Wilson went on the record in the Legislature and made the claim he watched someone die right in front of him, despite the fact no one has ever died in a Supervised Consumption Site in Alberta—or anywhere in Canada,” said Chris Gallaway. “The Minister may be legally protected as to what he says inside the Legislature Chamber, but it is beyond irresponsible to mislead the public with statements like this. He needs to apologize immediately or the Premier needs to boot him from Cabinet.”
Decades worth of research from around the world has repeatedly shown that SCS save lives and enable cost savings by avoiding emergency services. Yet in recent months, the government has aggressively pushed forward a series of SCS closures, even while Alberta’s paramedics are being “pushed to their breaking point,” and hospital emergency departments are struggling with “extreme overcapacity” and “disastrous overcrowding,” with harmful impacts on our entire hospital and health care systems.
“Unfortunuately, playing fast and loose with the facts is a pattern of behavior with this government when it comes to their so-called Alberta Recovery Model,” said Gallaway. “The government has consistently delayed or withheld data when justifying their decisions, going so far as to set up CoRE, a government-controlled crown corporation specifically designed to churn out reports that support their agenda.”
Since establishing Recovery Alberta, the provincial government has doggedly pursued an ideological approach to addictions care, including an aggressive shift towards under-regulated, private and for-profit services, and passing legislation to allow forced treatment, even despite considerable evidence showing this approach puts Albertans at risk of more harm and more fatalities. An audit of Recovery Alberta by the Auditor General is currently underway, announced amid the office's ongoing investigation into the allegations of potential corruption in how health care contracts have been awarded to private surgical companies in Alberta.
“Despite the government's claims about the success of their so-called Alberta Recovery Model, very little verifiable evidence has ever been provided to back up these claims. Alberta remains in a drug poisoning crisis, with multiple lives lost every day due to a lack of access to services,” said Gallaway. “What it comes down to is that addictions care is health care, and it must be treated as such. Albertans deserve that decisions about our health care services be based on the best medical evidence available. Not ideology, not political spin, and certainly not flagrant tall tales shared in the Legislative Assembly.”
Friends of Medicare continues to encourage Albertans to support our calls for urgent, evidence-based action to save lives in the drug poisoning crisis
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