Trudeau Must Release Data on Taxpayer-Funded Drug Diversion

August 1, 2024
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Ottawa, ON – After nine years of Justin Trudeau, Canadian communities have become havens for drugs, death and disorder. The Liberal Government’s failed experiment of taxpayer-funded hard drugs has flooded our communities with dangerous opioids, causing drug deaths to increase by 184 percent since 2015.

The complete failure of Trudeau’s taxpayer-funded hard drugs program was confirmed again today after the Waterloo Regional Police Service and Niagara Regional Police Service revealed to the National Post that hydromorphone seizures had exploded by 1,090% and 1,577% respectively.

In Waterloo, only 508 hydromorphone pills were seized in 2019. But in 2023, just three years after Trudeau’s taxpayer-funded hard drug program became widely available, the number of hydromorphone pills seized skyrocketed to 5,538 pills. This deeply troubling trend is also apparent in Niagara where only 291 hydromorphone pills were seized in 2019. In 2023, the number of sized hydromorphone pills also exploded, reaching 4,590 pills.

This follows a press conference from the Chief of the London Police Service who confirmed what Common Sense Conservatives have been saying for years: “diverted safe supply is being resold into our community, it’s being trafficked into other communities, and it is being used as currency in exchange for fentanyl, fueling the drug trade.” And this is happening across the country. In British Columbia, the Vancouver Police Department said that around 50 percent of all hydromorphone seizures were diverted from Trudeau’s taxpayer-funded hard drugs program.

Justin Trudeau and the Liberals always claim they support “the science” but they don’t want to know how many of their government-provided opioids are seized by police. The Liberals even rejected the Province of Alberta’s request to trace the source of harmful opioids being released into our communities. Some police forces are now releasing numbers revealing widespread drug diversion on their own, but Canadians still deserve to understand the scale of this Trudeau Government disaster. That’s why Common Sense Conservatives are calling on Justin Trudeau’s Addiction Minister, Ya’ara Saks, to release all the hard drug diversion statistics from police services across the country and to implement proposed plans to allow police to trace the source of these taxpayer-funded drugs.

Justin Trudeau must finally accept that his experiment of taxpayer-funded hard drugs has failed, resulting in massive diversions of Trudeau’s so-called “safer supply” into the hands of drug dealers who turn around and sell it to kids.

Only a Conservative Government will stop handing out taxpayer-funded hard drugs, ban them and invest in treatment and recovery to bring home our loved ones drug free.