Firefighters in Vancouver tend to an overdose victim in September.Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail
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As Canada's overdose crisis continues to worsen, fatal overdoses now rival car accidents and suicide among the leading causes of death in this country.
New figures from the Public Health Agency of Canada show more than 4,000 people died of overdoses in 2017, which appears to be the worst year on record. That’s more than 30 per cent more than the previous year, with the vast majority of those overdoses involving the synthetic opioid fentanyl.
In comparison about 4,400 Canadians died by suicide in 2015, the last year for which data is available, about 2,000 people died in motor vehicle accidents, and 611 people were killed in homicides.
The death toll continues to increase even as federal and provincial governments pour millions of dollars into their response to the crisis through expanded treatment and harm-reduction services, such as supervised drug-use sites. Just a few days ago, Ottawa introduced new rules to expand access to prescription heroin and methadone.
The statistics were released as Saskatchewan rejected a settlement in a decade-long legal battle between patients and the pharmaceutical giant whose pain pill triggered the deadly opioid epidemic. The judge ruled an $18-million settlement that Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, has agreed to pay is neither fair nor reasonable for those individuals who became addicted after their doctors prescribed the drug.
This is the daily Politics Briefing newsletter, written by Chris Hannay Ottawa, Mayaz Alam in Toronto and James Keller in Vancouver. If you’re reading this on the web or someone forwarded this email newsletter to you, you can sign up for Politics Briefing and all Globe newsletters here. Have any feedback? Let us know what you think.
CANADIAN HEADLINES
The B.C.-born whistle-blower who has exposed alleged misuse of Facebook data says a Victoria-based technology company participated in dirty tricks campaigns in several countries that included hacking into computers and spreading violent anti-Muslim videos to intimidate voters. Christopher Wylie testified before a Parliamentary committee in the U.K., alleging that AggregateIQ has undermined democratic institutions in multiple countries. AggregateIQ has denied any wrongdoing.
Just two provinces — New Brunswick and Nova Scotia — are on track to meet their greenhouse-gas emission targets by 2020, and only five had targets to begin with, according to a report from Canadian auditors-general.
A collection of eight federal health agencies need to be extensively overhauled to eliminate duplication and address significant policy gaps, says an external review of the pan-Canadian health organizations. One of the report’s authors says things are so bad it’s not clear if the agencies are having any appreciable impact on the health-care system.
The City of Burnaby, B.C., says it will ask the Supreme Court of Canada to overturn a ruling that found Kinder Morgan could ignore some local bylaws as it builds the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. Burnaby’s mayor opposes the project.
Critics of British Columbia’s new tax on absentee homeowners say changes announced this week designed to soften the impact for Canadian vacation home owners don’t go far enough. Doug Gilchrist, a spokesperson for the City of Kelowna, whose mayor was among the most vocal opponents, says the changes will lessen the pain but the tax will still hurt the community.
The Globe and Mail Editorial Board on Canada’s FIFA bid: “By this point, no public office-holder on the planet can plausibly claim ignorance of the perils of handing sacks of money to FIFA, or to the International Olympic Committee, for that matter.”
Gary Mason (The Globe and Mail) on Brian Pallister: “Not only has he angered one of the province’s most powerful figures and a key party benefactor, he’s also infuriated and alienated an Indigenous community whose co-operation he’s going to need down the road. It’s quite a predicament he’s found himself in, most of it of his own making.”
Adam Radwanski (The Globe and Mail) on Ontario’s Liberals: “Kathleen Wynne is often billed, on the evidence of her performance leading Ontario’s Liberals back to majority government four years ago, as an unusually good campaigner. She will need to be an absolutely superlative one, if she is to win back voters on the strength of what appears to be the centrepiece of her party’s platform in this spring’s provincial election.”
John Ibbitson (The Globe and Mail) on the politics of anger in Ontario: “People were angry when they elected Mike Harris and Stephen Harper. But neither leader allowed himself to be defined by anger. Neither was much of a populist. But Doug Ford doesn’t just understand that anger, he embodies it. That’s what makes him a populist in a way his predecessors never were. And the odds are good it will make him premier.”
Susan Delacourt (iPolitics) on big data and elections: “I have my doubts that political parties will want to surrender all the hard work they’ve done on accumulating voter databases to the sunlight of transparency. But who knows? This could turn out to be a pivotal moment in the history of political marketing. Perhaps people will soon start asking hard questions about the extent to which they’ve been manipulated by being reduced to data points in a marketing campaign. Or maybe they’ll ask the hardest question of all: If Big Data wants to make big claims about its colossal power, why not produce the data on how it works?”
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INTERNATIONAL HEADLINES
At the beginning, there was only an armoured train in Beijing. When a train believed to be from North Korea and commonly used by dignitaries pulled up in China, speculation and mystery reigned. Inside the train was North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un and his wife Ri Sol-ju, who made a surprise visit to Beijing for diplomatic talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping. It is the first known foreign trip for Mr. Kim since he became leader in 2011 and has placed China back at the centre of deescalating tensions in the Korean peninsula. The relationship between the two countries had soured during Mr. Kim’s tenure but the leaders reportedly discussed a peaceful resolution to the situation. To that end, Chinese state media report that Mr. Kim is willing to speak with the United States and hold a summit with the South Koreans and the Americans.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have given nearly US$1-billion to United Nations humanitarian efforts in Yemen. Saudi Arabia has been waging a proxy war against Yemen’s Houthi rebels for more than three years in a humanitarian crisis that has left 22 million people needing aid.
The United States and South Korea have reached an agreement in overhauling the U.S-Korea Free Trade Agreement, widening American access to the East Asian country’s car market and giving American manufactures protection from imports.
British Prime Minister Theresa May is urging a long-term response to the threat posed by Russia. Britain and its allies, including Canada, expelled dozens of Russian diplomats in a coordinated effort following the nerve agent attack against a former Russian spy and his daughter, which has been blamed on the Kremlin.
Tensions between Kosovo and Serbia, two countries that were once part of the former Yugoslavia, continue to heighten, and Russia has waded into the dispute.
Ann Cavoukian (The Globe and Mail) on what needs to change about privacy: “We can do this by using the innovative technologies of artificial intelligence encompassing deep reinforcement learning, homomorphic encryption, blockchain and evolutionary computation. We have tools that can serve as technologies of freedom – not the dystopian view of dated zero-sum, win-lose models. This is a call to all privacy-loving technologists: Let’s take the road less travelled and develop technologies that will preserve our privacy and, most importantly, our cherished freedoms.”
Lawrence Martin (The Globe and Mail) on Putin and the U.S.: “Mr. Putin is an old-school authoritarian. He’s entrenched. He has no designs on friendship with the West. Some, such as Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, who is barred from entering Russia, get it. European leaders are gaining resolve, seeing Mr. Putin for what he is. But given who is in the Oval Office, the big dog isn’t about to lose ground.”
Colin Robertson (The Globe and Mail) on the G7: “The Putin problem needs readdressing by the G7 at Charlevoix, Que. As host, Canada must be strategic in offering ideas. There is more than enough global disarray without tumbling into a new Cold War. ”
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