Daphne Bramham: Why isn’t the overdose crisis an election issue? Because it’s complicated, expensive and controversial

If more than 12,800 Canadians had died in the past three years due to flu or gunshot wounds, causing life expectancy estimates to drop for the first time in decades, it’s inconceivable that it wouldn’t be something that federal party leaders would be talking about.

Yet that is the number who have died in the epidemic of opioid overdose deaths from January 2016 to the end of March this year.

None of the federal leaders has strolled along Vancouver’s Hastings Street near Main at the epicentre of the crisis. None is likely to do so, and that is not only because NDP incumbent Jenny Kwan is generally believed to have a lock on the riding.

The opioid addiction/fentanyl overdose crisis has devastated a neighbourhood that already had more than its share of problems. The chaos and abject misery there are so vividly obvious that it is an indictment of both past and present social policies.

All of the parties’ addictions plans are short on details.

The Conservatives are mostly likely to appeal to the majority of Canadians with their focus on recovery. It echoes many of the recommendations in the B.C. Centre on Substance Use’s 2018 report, Strategies to Strengthen Recovery, including enhanced funding for education, acute care and a range of services to support recovery.

Recovery services have been neglected for decades as provinces have put most of their scarce money for addiction services into keeping addicts alive by providing free needles and supervised injection sites.

“Rather than just maintaining addictions and maintaining people in a lifetime of unimaginable hardship and terribly dangerous behaviour, breaking that cycle and focusing on recovery is our focus,” leader Andrew Scheer said at a meeting with The Vancouver Sun’s editorial board.

“We understand that recovery programs are the best way to get people off of addictive drugs and what we’re saying in this platform is that we want to start the groundwork to refocus some of the attention.”

His party’s promises: $36 million for recovery community centres, including high schools, that support both the people trying to overcome their addictions and their families, and $30 million for a national education program that focuses on the benefits of staying drug-free.

These are only first steps, Scheer said, adding that the goal is “to precisely avoid the prospect of people having to lose everything in their lives before they are able to start to get well again. This will take cooperation. It will take resources. It will take provincial government buy-in. But we believe that with this platform, we can start that.”

Scheer stopped short of committing to universal access to all recovery services under provincial health-care plans, even though the cost of residential care — the highest level of treatment — is well beyond the economic reach of most middle-income Canadians.

The Tory plan also addresses the dismaying fact that many inmates come out of prison addicted. It proposes full body scans of anyone entering prisons to keep illicit drugs out, noting that in 2018, correctional officers seized 376 grams of hashish, 80 grams of crystal methamphetamines, 72 grams of opioids, and 55 grams of crack cocaine.

It promises better rehabilitation services for inmates, although the cost of the prison programs is not included in the platform.

The Liberals disavowed part of their platform earlier in the campaign after the Conservatives began running Chinese-language ads and sent out a media release saying that the Liberals would legalize drugs.

The platform states they would establish a drug treatment court as a default option for first-time, non-violent offenders charged with simple possession.

In an email, party spokesman Guy Gallant insisted that Liberals would neither decriminalize nor legalize illicit drugs.

What is left is a promise of $700 million over the four years for more community-based services, more in-patient rehab beds, and scaling up “the most effective programs such as extending hours for InSite and other safe consumption sites.”

New Democrats support decriminalization — not legalization — and would invest $400 million over four years on overdose prevention sites and better access to treatment. Only the Greens support providing a safe supply of drugs to addicts and would spend $500 million over five years to provide drug-testing equipment to community organizations, more naloxone kits to treat overdoses, and unspecified “medical support” to combat addictions.

If only this were a flu epidemic fixed with a vaccine or a problem solved by restricting guns. Canada’s addiction crisis is far more complicated. Even the idea that addiction is a health issue — as opposed to a moral failing — is controversial in some communities.

Addressing addictions requires untangling and dealing with the causes that often include trauma, chronic pain, mental health, homelessness and poverty.

As nascent as the parties’ platforms are, there is consensus that what is being done isn’t working.

And that should be enough for the new government to open a public conversation about what the next steps might be.

Twitter: @bramham_daphne