497. Alberta vs Ottawa: A New Vision of Health | Minister Dan Williams
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So I had the pleasure today of speaking to Dan Williams, who's the Minister of Mental Health and Addiction in my home province.

Alberta and there was a variety of reasons why I had the conversation why I wanted to pursue it some of which I think are relevant to an international audience the culture war that plagues the West is playing out very intensely in Canada perhaps more intensely than anywhere else given that our Prime Minister is the poster boy for the progressive left and I mean that in the most literal possible sense and

So the political drama in Canada is emblematic of the political drama that is characterizing the international scene in the developed world. And so it's very much worthwhile paying attention, oddly enough, to the Canadian political scene. And the tension between the progressive left, let's say, the marginalized types who are trying to occupy the center, and the center itself is quite well demonstrated in Alberta today.

in consequence of the tension between the federal government, run by the Trudeau Liberals, insofar as they're running anything, and the Alberta government, which is, what would you say, emblematic of the typical track of Canadian conservatism, with an entrepreneurial bent that makes Alberta somewhat more like the United States. And so we talked about that,

dynamic as well in the Canadian political dynamic, but also because Alberta has a entrepreneurial flair there are policy movements in that province that are of I think compelling international interest and one of those is the attempts made by the Alberta government to seriously address the problems of homelessness and addiction and Dan helped

elucidate the Alberta approach to that problem, which is practical, scalable, and by all evidence, preliminary evidence still, because the programs are relatively new, much more effective than the foolish enabling policies of the radical Canadian left. So join us for a walk through the culture war

the way it's played out in Canada as an emblem of that, and a discussion of practical conservative solutions, let's say, to one of the biggest public health crises that besets North America in particular today.

Let's begin with just an overview of the Canadian political structure. We have a lot of international viewers and Canadians themselves could use a refresher. So maybe start by outlining the provincial federal government structure and then talk about your riding.

how you're elected there, what it means to be a minister of the Crown, and how the Premier is, and well, the Prime Minister for that matter, is selected. So just give us a primer with regards to the Canadian political structure. Sure. Thanks, Jordan. The start of the system starts with the British North America Act.

which is effectively the basis of our constitution in Canada now. So it was established by an act of the legislature, Parliament in London, England in 1867. And that sets out the framework that the political structure of Canada hangs on to.

And so there is a federal government which meets in Ottawa in Parliament there. It has a House of Commons, House of Lords. The prime minister is the individual that can hold the confidence of the House of Commons. And then every single province, there are 10 of them, get to have their own legislature. And the premier of each of those provinces is the one who holds the confidence of that, meaning has the most votes.

in the legislature or the House of Commons. The reason that's so important is because in that British North America Act or Constitution, it delineates very clearly different areas of jurisdiction. So right from the very authority, the foundational document that sets up Canada, there are some areas of jurisdiction that are exclusively the responsibility of the federal government. There are other areas that are responsibility of each province, like in the United States, like a state would have its own responsibility. So

What happens is, if you're talking about questions of education or healthcare or transportation, those are questions that the provinces get to decide themselves. And it's not as though the federal government has given us permission

to do that. It's not devolved the way you might see in the UK with, you know, the Welsh Senate or the Scottish Parliament. It's not the same at all. It is, from the very start, different sovereign authorities in those areas established in our constitution.

So that means Alberta, the province I'm from, has authority in the Constitution to make decisions to do with, say, health care. I'm a minister of health with mental health and addictions. That's my responsibility. And then we can collaborate with other provinces. And sometimes the federal government has funding or initiatives that they might want to do. But it is within the four walls of the province of Alberta, our responsibility to deliver that, to set the policies and to move forward.

And so the way that the political structure works is there is this natural division and sometimes as a consequence natural tension between the interests of a federal government in Ottawa and a provincial government in Alberta. And that sets up the framework in which we talk about the political divisions within Canada.

Okay, so we'll break that into two streams. So in Canada, people running for political office, either provincially or federally, are allied with a political party. And in Canada, there are basically three main parties. There's the Liberals who...

rule federally most of the time. There's the various versions of the Conservatives who've been around for a long time and are the second most popular party, generally speaking, although more frequently than that on the provincial side. And then there's the NDP, the Socialists. That's right. Right. And so, and that's been the case in Canada really since the early 1960s. And those

parties with some variation operate at a provincial level and at a federal level. And so if you're running provincially, what would be a typical campaign for you, for example, when you're attempting to gain your seat in the House in Alberta? Right. So before the general election campaign comes, where individuals would run for that seat to be a member of the legislature or perhaps federally member of parliament, there's first often a nomination. That

That nomination is an election within the political party to decide who's going to be our candidate that we put forward. And so you need to be a member of that party to be able to vote in that. And then you would be able to, from there, if you're a member of that party, exercise your interests and saying, I want to vote for Dan or I don't want to vote for Dan. If I win that sort of pre-election, the nomination, then it goes to a general election. And in Alberta, along with much of the prairies, so western sort of prairie provinces, it's

It's really a debate between the conservatives on one side in some form and the NDP, the New Democratic Party, on the other. And the NDP is, as you stated, they're self-defined as socialists in their own constitution. Interestingly, the roots of the conservatives within Alberta and all the western provinces and the roots of the NDP come from the same place. This sort of populist, prairie populism movement, which doesn't have

the same connection to populism that people associate with the rest of the world. It existed long before populism became a common sort of attack in public commentary referring to Trump and others internationally. Prairie populism is what the socialists grew out of with the CCF, which was actually formed at the Royal Canadian Legion in Calgary, from my understanding. And out of that branch also came a grassroots reform movement.

It came as a social credit party earlier on in Alberta's history, and then eventually became sort of the conservative articulation of populism. Right. So there's a bottom-up bubbling up of political sentiment that's very characteristic of Western Canada. That's exactly right. It makes itself manifest on the centre-right and on the centre-left. And the socialists in Canada were really a working-class labour union party organization.

Up until, what, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, when things started to shift, something like that. That's right. Today's NDP is not your grandfather's NDP. No, that's for sure. I mean, you come from the same part of Alberta I come from, where Grant Notley, who was a member of the legislature at the time for the Socialist Party, was elected in rural Alberta, which is as deep blue, i.e., as deep conservative as it gets in Canada. Yep.

And so it's very, very different. You can even look at George Grant, who I think is one of Canada's greatest political authors and public commentators, who started off supporting the CCF and the NDP and then quickly realized that this was not the brand that he wanted to get behind and became a big backer of Diefenbaker. And he wrote his famous book, Lament for a Nation, with the defeat of Diefenbaker in the 60s.

to election. Right. So in Canada, for a reasonable amount of time, I think it was appropriate for the socialists, especially on the Labour Party end, to represent themselves as emblematic of working people. And the Conservatives,

were more and regarded more as the party of large business enterprises. And that's shifted substantially in Canada now, both at the federal and the provincial level. Do you want to comment on that? Yeah, I'd say that it was really the liberals that were the corporatist party for the longest time within Canada. If you look at Dieffenbaker's campaign, you look at the NDP, they both were fighting over a working class population with different values that inform it.

But it was the liberals that were the corporatists more than anything else. And that changed with the West generally, whether you're looking at the UK, US, the entire Anglo sphere, you saw that conservative parties became more associated with corporate interests. That's not the historical roots of conservatism in Canada, right? It was, as you said, bubbling up, grassroots conservatism.

different versions of a blue-collar interest that grew out of the same place within the prairies. It's similar in some ways to what's happening with the MAGA movement in the United States, although Americans are more dramatic and they have more of a flair for, well, for showmanship. So there's an over-the-top theatricality about American politics that has it

really been absent in Canada. We're much more sedate in our political operations. I think it's partly because as well,

Can you talk a little bit about the restrictions on campaigning in Canada? Yeah, so dollars and cents are much more limited within Canada. So the campaign that I would run, the provincial law limits to approximately $50,000 within my constituency, which is ample. I have to put up some signs and be able to host some coffees and be able to get around the constituency, which is quite big. It's about 100,000 square kilometers, the same territory you're from, so it's the same size as Canada.

the island of Newfoundland or I mean I bet you I could find a half dozen American states that are smaller than my constituency and so it's quite a large area and that's where a lot of the dollars go. So the politics is different because of the limitations on dollars and cents for sure. Yeah well and there's a duration limitation too right so the intense campaigning is what 90 days?

generally speaking? Yeah, well, the writ period is normally about 30 days. That's what it is within Alberta law. As we move to a more of an American fixed election date, that is becoming less of an important distinction. Historically, with snap elections in the Westminster system, it's not like the American system, where we know every four years there's going to be an election in whatever, whether you're talking presidential or Congress election on these four-year cycles. What

instead happened in Canada and the UK and the Western Westminster system all across the Commonwealth was you could have an election anytime. So spending valuable campaign resources with an attempt to campaign before you know there's an election did not make sense. So the 30 day rip period

really was effectively that official campaign, and people largely stuck to it. Increasingly, there are more jurisdictions like Alberta that are going to a fixed election date. And so as people see that campaign coming, there are more and more use of campaign resources happening before the campaign period even begins. I want to talk about a little bit or ask you a little bit about...

the situation of Alberta in relationship to the federal government and the drama that's playing out in Canada. Because I think that what's happening in Canada is emblematic of what's happening in the West in general, especially on the energy side. Now, one of the things you pointed out is that the provinces and the federal government have very different jurisdictions of power. And we should be clear, just so everybody understands, that the jurisdictions of power that the provinces have in Canada are not trivial.

energy and resources, health, education. Education, transportation. Yeah, right. So just those three alone, really, what you could argue, take up the bulk of what might be considered normal, important politics. And so those are provincial jurisdictions. Now, there's a reasonable amount of tension in Canada at the moment between the provinces and also between the provinces, some of the provinces and the federal government. So let's talk about province to province. Right.

tension at the moment. So one of the, so walk us through the equalization payment

So equalization is a wealth redistribution mechanism. In fact, it's a suite of different mechanisms that happen. And some of them are formalized under this idea of transfer payments. And some of them are informal, just in the way that the federal government collects taxes and the way that they spend those taxes afterwards. But the way that it works is the idea is that some provinces at different times in history have been flushed.

They've been able to support their own residents because of natural resources, because of economic investment, of all sorts of different varieties. And the idea is, in spite of one province doing well, we want to make sure the entire country is able to manage. And I think most Albertans are

big Canadians, they're big Westerners and they want to see the rest of the province succeed, the rest of the provinces succeed. But increasingly it's become really clear for Albertans for a long time now that Alberta is not getting its fair share, that increasingly we see a huge transfer, the tune of billions of dollars leaving Alberta and not returning, collected in taxes because we have a younger population, higher employment rate, with higher salaries, working in the resource industry,

that some neighboring provinces will collect those dollars in redistribution payments, but want to shut down the industry at the same time. Yes, well, so there's a variety of things here that are worth delving into. So I found out, for example, that Quebec, which is the province, the French-speaking province primarily, to which the bulk of Albertan transfer payments go, and Quebec...

I'm speaking, what would you say, generally here, but the sentiment in Quebec is quite strongly anti-energy development, and yet their economy depends on the transfer payments that come from Alberta. And even more to the point, Quebec has enough natural gas to supply itself for 200 years, or the European Economic Council

block for 50 years and they've decided for one reason or another not to develop those resources, which is a very interesting decision, especially given that they import hundreds of millions of dollars worth of natural gas from the United States, which seems relatively insane given that it's sitting there right underneath the ground. And so this is something that actually gets my back up to quite a degree and I don't know if I'm actually reasonable about it because

It's one thing for Albertans to transfer billions of dollars to Quebec, let's say. It's a whole other thing to do so while the Quebec population moralizes about their superiority on the environmental front while perfectly taking

money that the energy industry is capable of producing. And it's not merely a parochial concern on my part, being an Albertan, let's say. I lived in Quebec. I loved Montreal. There's some great things about Quebec. Don't get me wrong. But their high-handed moralizing with regards to the energy industry is not one of the things that is good about Quebec. And it's also the case—you can tell me what you think about this—

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Most of the people who are bilingual in Canada come from Quebec and you have to be bilingual essentially, and correct me if I've got any of this wrong, to work in the civil service. And so what that means, and I've never seen figures to lay this out statistically, is that

the denizens of Quebec are radically overrepresented in Canada's version of the deep state. And that also doesn't strike me as particularly good for Alberta's interests. And so one of the things I'm curious about, and maybe this will be the most contentious part of the interview, is I don't understand why Alberta puts up with this. Like, if something radical was done, like, I know this isn't going to happen, and I'm not saying it should happen, but if Alberta said, we're done with transfer payments, what would happen?

Well, I mean, the problem is we don't collect the taxes the federal government does. So there's only so many levers we hold. I think Albertans have said politically over and over again, we're done with being treated as second-class citizens within our own country. We're a member of the Confederation. We're a part of Canada. We're providing an economic engine so that Quebec can thrive, so that when the fisheries shut down on the East Coast, we saw...

upon thousands of folks from Newfoundland and other parts of the Maritimes and Eastern Canada come to Alberta to work in the oil sands in northern Alberta and Fort McMurray to work in the oil and gas and the energy industry. And they were welcomed. And very, I mean, I have a friend who married a friend out in the East Coast and

And there's this expression on the East Coast where you're a CFA, a come from away. He's going to have grandkids that are going to own a cottage there and they're going to be CFAs. Whereas in Alberta, you get a driver's license or a library card, you're from Alberta. Yeah, it's a remarkably classless society. It is. And when I knew Rex Murphy well and Canada's most famous Newfoundlander and he was...

He and the people he knew, and I toured through Newfoundland with Rex, were extraordinarily grateful to Alberta for the welcome that the Newfies had when the cod fishery collapsed. And it was genuine. And I mean, I grew up at the height of the oil boom in Alberta, and I can remember the influx of people from Newfoundland. And the only friction really that ever occurred, and it wasn't friction,

People told Newfie jokes. But other than that, and they weren't harsh and they weren't mean, they were funny. And Newfoundlanders have a great sense of humor, by and large, so it wasn't a problem. But my experience was that Alberta really did welcome in the Newfies with open arms. Absolutely. Many of them are just Albertans now. And we happily consider them a part of our culture and our heritage and who we are that

were able to provide energy to so much of Canada jobs. It's not just an economic point. And I think as a conservative in Alberta, I need to make this clear. It's a social and a cultural point. This bound Canada together to have two different sides that had very few common experiences. I mean, I went to Newfoundland. I couldn't understand the weather report.

But being able to connect through this economic engine of the oil and gas industry in Alberta allowed us to bond together with this distant, far-flung part of the country that only joined in 1949. So there is some utility in spreading the risk. Like you could think about the transfer payment structure if it was run fairly as a form of insurance, long-term insurance, right? So when you're doing well, well, then you can afford to be generous. And when you're not doing so well, then maybe...

another, like the manufacturing sector might be booming. Alberta, if I remember correctly, was the recipient of transfer payments at some point. Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, well, and Alberta was also developed to some degree as a consequence of investment in the West by the... By McDonald and the CP Rail line, of course. Yeah, so it can be a deal that works, but at the moment, like...

Well, there's a bunch of... It's the hypocrisy that's the issue. It's the idea that... And the money. The hypocrisy and the money. They go hand in hand, right? I mean, Brad Wall, a former premier of Saskatchewan, said maybe Quebec will accept a pipeline if we say we'll only deliver our transfer payments through a pipeline. Right, yeah. You can't have one without the other. The idea of moralizing about the energy industry that provides, again, not just an economy, but...

Rex Murphy made this point. It saved countless marriages. It saved countless families. The carnage that happens when an economy collapses. I mean, when you see the GDP of my province go down as the Minister of Mental Health and Addiction, I tragically see suicide rates go up. Yes. And this is a corollary that happens

universally across the world. I mean, it's not just an economic argument. It's about the fabric of who we are as Canadians. It's about the idea that there's fairness in our confederation. This idea that you can help someone out, not just economically, but help them be able to provide for their family, save a marriage. That is meaningful, meaningful collaboration. Albertans have no axe to grind with that.

So many of us come from other parts of the country initially. We have a problem with the very means in which we're enabling the rest of the country to succeed is being dumped on by them in the next breath. Well, we should take that apart a bit more too. So another thing that for everybody who's international watching and listening, another thing that makes Alberta of substantive interest is that Alberta has the third largest fossil fuel reserves in the world. And, and,

and also the technology and the relatively strict environmental regulations to allow those resources to be used in the most environmentally friendly manner given the framework of fossil fuel utilization. And so the truth of the matter is, the stark cold truth of the matter is, is that if we don't use Alberta fossil fuels, then China burns coal, for example, which they are at a substantial rate.

And part of the reason that's happening is because we're saddled with a federal government who most insultingly put Guilbeau, right? What's his ministry? Environment. Right, right, right. And he's been an environmental activist since he was five. He was arrested, I think, with some sort of environmental activism with Greenpeace in the past. Like, it's just, it's surreal to Albertans that this is the way that

Prime Minister Trudeau chooses to try and support our industries, appointing the most radical activists against us to the minister of the crown who's responsible for overseeing this in the country. He couldn't have possibly chosen someone who would manifest more enmity to the basic economic structure of Western Canada. And...

And all of Canada. Yes. Well, right, right. Yes, definitely. That is the economic engine, I think. Well, and what's the consequence? So you know that the poorest state in the United States by GDP per capita is Mississippi. Yeah. Canadians in the richest province have lower GDP per capita than people in Mississippi. Right. And that divergence has occurred since Trudeau took office. So we're now at 60%.

of GDP per capita by American standards. Now, the Europeans aren't doing much better, but in Canada, it's particularly egregious because there's absolutely no reason at all that Canadians, we should be wealthier. We should be wealthier than the Americans if we were governed by people who had even the least wealth.

the least amount of sense, federally in particular. I think fundamentally it comes down to this recognition that what choices you make in government have consequences. It's not an abstraction. I think that the institutions of Canada have not been working, and we can go more into that because I think it's a heart of one of the problems that we faced here. But fundamentally,

Who we elect, the decisions we make are consequential. You don't believe me? Look at the history of Argentina since the 1920s. There's no guarantee. Or even in the last year. And the reversal, right? So there is no guarantee that because you were prosperous and you could provide for the vulnerable, you could help those who are destitute. You could invest in infrastructure and in hospitals. No guarantee that you get to do that indefinitely into the future. You need to manage...

responsibly in good governance, which is Canada's heritage, the gifts that we've received in stewardship. And the Trudeau government has absolutely wasted the resources that we've had. And on top of the economic disaster, which again has social consequences, that's families that are breaking apart, suicides tragically that increase. On top of that, they poured fuel on a fire and somehow flamed, a fan those flames,

when we look at the social policy, when we talk about the addiction crisis in North America, they somehow found a way to take the addiction crisis of the 1990s and 2000s and make it worse. Much worse. And that is quite a thing. Well moralizing insanely. That's right. And having exactly the opposite policy of what the data and the facts say you ought to never mind common sense. And that's just one example.

You could go across the spectrum and you could go over and over again and look at what Canada has become. And I think part of it is the institutions that we rely upon. Canadians built institutions. These institutions were strong. These institutions were what mitigated and sort of the common life that Canadians lived through, whether it's your schools or you're talking about recreation opportunities or the government itself, the courts, the media, politics.

the academia. These are institutions that mediated public life, that Canadians lived through their interactions, not often directly with the Prime Minister's office, but instead through all these institutions. And whether you're talking about the Supreme Court, the Senate, or you're talking about the way local sport clubs are run, they're failing Canadians. So, okay, so let's talk about some of Danielle Smith's new initiatives. Now,

The Conservatives, 10 years ago I would say, in Canada, had been set back on their heels on the moral front and tactically by the radical progressives. And my experience with the progressives at that time was that they were uncertain about how to proceed, not least because if they manifested any signs of social conservatism,

rather than economic conservatism, the progressives would isolate them one by one and take them out. And so, but over the last 10 years, I've seen a new breed of conservative emerge in Canada. Both Polyev and Daniel Smith, the premier of Alberta, I think are emblematic of that. And she's a tough cookie and she's smart. And she just made some modifications to the Alberta constitution.

- That's right. - Human Rights Act. - Alberta Bill of Rights. - The Alberta Bill of Rights, right. Okay, so can you detail out that a bit and also explain why she did that? And people are gonna be wondering too, including Albertans and other Canadians, like, well, how does Alberta have a Bill of Rights?

What's the relationship between that and the Canadian Charter of Rights? Right, so the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a constitutional document. Pierre Trudeau, Trudeau Senior, Justin Trudeau, the current Prime Minister's father, repatriated the Constitution in 1982, which is just a way of saying that he said that the buck stops again with Parliament and the Supreme Court of Canada rather than going back to London for a final say. And so part of that was also introducing a Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Now, when that charter was introduced, the intention was to preserve Canadians' liberties and freedoms. And it was meant to be... Hypothetically. Well, I think there's a lot of concern. And we can talk about the role of the Supreme Court, which I think is one of the more fascinating conversations that Canadians aren't having in relation to the elected parliaments and legislatures of Canada.

But the Alberta Bill of Rights was one that predates that charter. Right. That's an important point. Right. And it applies to provincial jurisdiction. Obviously, Alberta can't be making laws that apply to federal jurisdiction. And it's not constitutional in that sense.

What it is, is a document that has sort of precedence within our series of different bills and legislation that we have passed in Alberta that is meant to protect Alberta's rights. And it has not been updated for decades. And so the idea that Premier Smith had, especially coming out of what has been a turbulent time where lots of fraught debate had happened throughout COVID and much of our society with other crises, saying we need to make sure this reflects the interests of Albertans.

And so within Alberta jurisdiction, this bill is going to amend it and include different rights, right to property, gun ownership. That's an important one because property rights in Canada are relatively weak. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I'm a natural law theorist, so I would say that what law, positive law only reflects, so the laws that we pass can only reflect

the fundamental laws that exist before us, right? And so the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, when Section 7, its most famous section, protects the right to life, liberty, and security of the person, it was great that Parliament in every single province in Canada

that and admits that, but it's not as though there wasn't a right to life, liberty, and security of the person before it became a part of the Constitution. I mean, that's a fundamental assumption about the nature of how rights work. And part of the English common law tradition. That's exactly right. That's a deep part of the

That's right. And that common law is based on a natural law that is reasoned, that exists independent of any positive articulation of it. And so this Bill of Rights is meant to be a reflection on the reality of those rights. And you could quote anyone from Locke to Pope Leo XIII in Rio Novarum, and you could talk about how rights and the rights of men predate the state. They pre-exist the state. And that's the nature of how rights work.

And so now Smith and your government have fortified, for example, people's rights to bodily autonomy and integrity. So if I understood correctly, this is probably the most media relevant portion of the transformation that Smith is introducing.

She's forbidding vaccine mandates. Yeah, I would say in effect, forbidding vaccine mandates. That's right. Because there is, I would articulate it saying that because we have intrinsic human dignity, right, that means that

with that dignity, when we're in possession of our faculties, when we can reasonably make our own decisions when it comes to healthcare, we ought to, right? You know, the Aussies are starting to apologize for the vaccine mandates at the state level. Yeah, that happened this week. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Well, the problem is, I think...

And this is probably a conservative proclivity, but we could have a discussion about that. If your policy, maybe there's an exception for criminals, let's say that to begin with. There's an exception for people who just will not play fair no matter what. Generally speaking, if your policy requires force, it's badly constituted.

Now, and so the vaccine policies required force. And so they weren't invitational and they should have been invitational. And so that was a big mistake. And there are cascading consequences of that that are independent of whether or not the vaccines work or whether they produce side effects, independent of the vaccine debate per se, is that

Public trust in public health has plummeted. And the reason for that is that if you use force, even for the good, if you use force, people aren't going to trust you. They're going to wonder what the hell you're up to. And rightly so. And so even if the vaccine program worked, and I don't think there's a shred of evidence for that, by the way, but I think you could have a debate about that. I think it's indisputable that the use of force

has counter consequences. So, for example, there's way more skepticism about vaccines in general, and perhaps some of that is warranted. I mean, Robert Kennedy is certainly pushing that idea. But diluting the trust that people have in the institutions that had protected them for a long time is a very bad idea. So, now, Smith has also reduced the power of the regulatory boards,

the colleges, the professional colleges for example. And so that's welcome news to someone like me of course because I'm still in danger of being re-educated if the Ontario College of Psychologists and Behavior Analysts can ever get their act together which is highly improbable given their previous behavior. But she's increased the protection for freedom of speech. I mean the Supreme Court in Canada basically decided in my case that

As far as I can tell, my interpretation of their ruling or their refusal to hear my appeal was something approximating

the professional regulatory boards can do anything they want that's reasonable. I don't know who determines that precisely, and the charter be damned. And so that seems to me to be a very bad idea given that one in five Canadians are in a regulated profession. And I know I've talked to many, many people who are in regulated professions and they are terrified to speak. And this is really bad, like it's really bad. So among psychologists, for example,

You're basically mandated if a parent brings in an adolescent who's having gender dysphoria trouble, real or socially constructed, let's say, you are mandated to affirm their choices. And I seriously can't think of anything more scandalous than that that's occurred within the psychological community and the medical community in the last hundred years. It's absolutely barbaric, but no one is...

brave enough, virtually no one's brave enough to buck the tide. And it's not surprising, you know, because the consequences of telling the truth, this means that your psychologists, the ones that are actually, you know, genuinely educated and competent, and the same goes for physicians.

They're mandated to lie to you about your children. They're mandated, for example, to swallow the lie that if you don't allow your child to transform themselves surgically into this sex they hypothetically are, that their suicide risk will be elevated, which is a complete bloody lie. There's not a shred of evidence for that, and there's plenty of evidence for the reverse.

So let's say you stood up against that and you were reported to your college. The consequences are going to be first, scandal. Second, tremendous expense because if there's a complaint against you, it's basically a legal case and it's very expensive to litigate and it takes forever. They've been chasing me for 10 years. It's cost me more than half a million dollars to fight them off so far as ineffectively as I've managed.

And so, and then if you lose your license or even if the scandal falls on you, because once there's a decision against you from the college, that's part of the public record and a little bit hard on you if you're trying to advertise your services, let's say. It's not surprising that physicians and psychologists and engineers and social workers and teachers won't say what they think. And then we're in a situation where professionals

The professionals you rely on in a crisis can't say what they think when you need them to. That is not good. That's seriously not good. And Canadians are seriously asleep at the wheel. And, you know, it's a weird thing because how old are you? 37. OK, so I'm a lot older than you. You're almost 30 years. Well, you know, the Canada that I grew up in, all of the institutions were fundamentally independent.

trustworthy and trusted. All of them, all of them. The education system, K to 12, the higher education system, the court system, the three-party political system. - The media? - The media, yeah. CBC, I watched CBC all the time when I was a kid while there were only two channels. And by and large, although it had a liberal tilt, I would say, no one presumed that CBC was bending the truth or advocating for the government.

Certainly no one assumed that to the point where they evinced skepticism about the coverage. I mean, we had a country that functioned extremely well, kind of

Without that showy entrepreneurial flair that the Americans have, which is really something to admire and emulate, Canada was a much more moderate place, a much more middle-class place, but fundamentally rock solid. And even the debates between the political parties were never... Everybody sort of stayed in their lane, and we knew where the political parties stood. And I don't know what the hell's happened in the last 15 years, but, like,

That time seems to me to be, it's seriously over. God only knows what's going to replace it.

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I think what's happened is the institutions have fundamentally failed at their roles. And this is true of every institution you mentioned. And a good case to look at would be the file around addiction. And it's something we, a good segue for us to get into it. Yeah, good, good. Is if you look at the United States and Canada, we're uniquely positioned as,

as the epicenter of the worldwide opioid addiction crisis. It really is here. And it's because of the failure of institutions. And you could tell the story all the way through, starting with 1995 when the FDA in the United States approved, and I think

in an insane decision, oxycodone, with big pharma. And they said that this would be good for public health. They said that there aren't risks of addiction. It's incredibly low. Oxycodone is twice as powerful as heroin, street heroin, right? It's also the case, by the way, and everyone who's listening should know this, that the probability that you can produce a pharmacological compound that's analgesic and not addictive is very low, right? Because the...

mechanism of action of analgesic medications is the same mechanism that produces drug-related reward. And so it's very difficult to separate those. Now you get

Anti-inflammatories can reduce pain by indirect mechanisms, but if you're directly affecting the systems that cause pain psychopharmacologically, you're going to be using compounds that have a high addiction potential. Even cocaine, which isn't generally used as an analgesic, has analgesic properties because of its psychomotor stimulant properties, and it seriously abuses pain.

what would you, eliciting and dependency eliciting. So, you know, the pharmaceutical companies were lying

with regards to the opiates on the most fundamental biological grounds imaginable. That's right, and it was very well known. I mean, what you're describing is not new science, right? No, no, definitely not. This is century old. Well, yes, the addiction properties for, well, longer than that even maybe, but the actual pharmacology at the neurological level, that's been pretty well established since I would say...

It's probably 50 years at the molecular level. And so what happened was the reason it went the way it did was not because of new science and not because of evidence that the mass opioid pandemic that we saw was because of marketing fundamentally and large amounts of dollars that were being traded transactionally. And we saw our regulatory bodies, our colleges, universities,

or the oversight bodies for physicians. We saw our medical schools. We saw every single institution in the medical world be co-opted by this, and so easily as well. Now we should explain, just so everybody knows about these colleges, because

The terminology is confusing because people typically think of a college as a university. But there are professional colleges, and professional colleges are organizations of professionals within a given profession, say engineers or physicians or psychologists, and they're tasked with the responsibility of being self-governing. And the self-governing bodies, at least somewhat self-governing and self-regulating, and those bodies are tasked with the regulation

regulation of their professionals so that the public is well served. And I would also say no one heard anything about regulatory colleges

That's only become an issue in the last 10 years. They operated fundamentally as administrative boards behind the scenes with no... No politics, no ideology. No, no media coverage. That's right. They basically dealt with professionals who had complaints levied against them, justified or not, by members of the general public and dealt with that in the appropriate administrative manner. Now they're completely politicized.

That's especially true with the legal regulatory. And they would have standards of practice, say, for example, for a medical professional regulatory body that would say, this is the best practice. And if you're not doing that for some reason, there could be some complaint against you. And then make sure that the public could know if you were a physician practicing in, say, Fairview, Alberta or Peace River, where we're from,

then you could trust that person isn't out there as some sort of quack. This is someone that we know the government says through this regulatory body has standards that they will meet. Because we want to make sure people can trust our professionals. And when it's not politicized, that's good, right? Now, the government establishes these colleges through legislation, right?

And so we obviously have a responsibility to say if they're not working the way they ought to to protect the public interest, if instead they're protecting a political ideology, then we need to make sure we intervene, which is the legislation that you mentioned that Premier Daniel Smith is bringing forward. We're going to be debating this session of the legislature. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And so that's when it's coming. Yeah.

And so what's happening, what happened in the mid-90s and early 2000s was fundamentally a question of institutions that were meant to protect us. The government had established or self-regulatory bodies or medical schools, academia, the research wing of universities. They are there to, in many different functions, protect us.

to protect us and to guide us and help us. And instead of doing that, as oxycodone became widespread and prescribed over four times the rate that it used to be, if you look at just 2012 alone, the end of this sort of mass prescription time of oxycodone, we saw there was about a quarter billion prescriptions in North America. That's enough for one prescription for every adult.

So it was incredibly widespread. The consequence of that was what used to be a market for opioids in L.A. and New York, in Vancouver and Toronto, with organic heroin that maybe came from South Asia. Instead, now, there was every single little town of Peace River and in Appalachia, Pennsylvania, and everywhere that had a physician that was told that this is safe,

that this doesn't have public health consequences, that these are non-addictive, that this is the way in the future to treat pain, especially if you're blue-collar, you got a prescription. Prescription for an opioid that's twice as powerful as heroin. And any sort of defense they had, the idea there was long-acting, you crush up the pill. Right, right, that's the issue there. That's, yes, exactly. And so the technology wasn't as sold. And so we should, just so people are clear about that, well, there's two things.

Tell everybody the nature of your ministry. You're the Minister of Mental Health and Addiction. That's right. And so we're going to delve into that. It was starting with the oxycodone story. And that's why you have specialized knowledge in this domain. And Alberta has a recovery program. What's it called? The Alberta Recovery Model. Alberta Recovery Model, right. And I talked to Jason Nixon, another minister of Smith's cabinet, and he said,

about this to some degree about a year ago. And so this is a continuation of that discussion. The reason I'm having these discussions, by the way, for everybody who's watching and listening, is because I think that Alberta has a model for the homelessness drug addiction problem that is

economically justifiable and effective and that could be duplicated widely, particularly in North America, and be duplicated effectively. And it contrasts very markedly, let's say, with the NDP's approach to the drug addiction problem in the province to the west of

of Alberta, right? British Columbia and the socialists, of course, won the election again, although much reduced in power. And so British Columbians are going to have to struggle through the same foolishness that they've been experiencing for the last eight years for another, well, we'll see. They didn't get much of a majority. Okay, so the Alberta recovery model is very promising. And I was impressed with Nixon because he...

he, well, he's been in that realm his whole life fundamentally because his parents were deeply involved with helping people out of addiction using extra governmental sources from the time he was a little kid. And so, you know, one of the things that struck me about what Alberta was doing was that you guys are not merely moving deck chairs on the Titanic, right? Like you've taken a very

sophisticated and multidimensional approach to the redressing of the homeless crisis and the addiction crisis in Alberta.

balancing quite nicely, balancing appropriate policing with appropriate rehabilitation. Very difficult thing to do. Now, it's my understanding, and correct me if this is wrong, tell me about the tent city situation in Alberta and how that's changed. Right. So within Alberta, we've fundamentally decided to take a different tack from what Canada has offered as a policy when it comes to addiction and homelessness for the last, say, 20 or 25 years.

If you have been to Canada, and it's true of many North American cities, but Canada, as we said off the start, seems to have found a way to aggravate it, to make it even worse than it naturally would have gone on its own. Alberta said, we're taking a different approach because it's getting worse, not better. And so tent cities are a function of homelessness and addiction and mental health, all converging.

into a population that is vulnerable, that needs supports. And the only thing that the rest of Canada has been doing for decades is effectively facilitating more of that addiction. I went to a correction facility in Alberta, our largest one, and I asked-

Pardon me? What facility? A corrections facility. Corrections facility. A jail. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that corrections facility, I asked the warden, how many people passing through your door end up admitting to a serious addiction? And they said 9 out of 10 indicate they have a serious addiction on their intake form and 1 out of 10 lie.

They believe it is ubiquitous that the population that's going through are struggling with addiction. Now, I'm not saying addiction is necessarily linked to crime. I'm saying that people who end up in our corrections facility have lots of problems that pre-exist the criminality. And if our only plan—

problem also has an alcohol problem. They co-occur very, very tightly. Because if you're going to abuse cocaine, well, you might as well cut it with alcohol. And if you're going to abuse cocaine, you might as well abuse alcohol and that sort of thing happens. Now, alcohol is notorious. It's a notorious drug. So it's the only drug we know of that reliably actually directly increases aggression.

It's implicated in 50%. Half the people who murder are drunk and half the people who are killed are drunk. Without alcohol, there would be almost no domestic violence. Alcohol is very bad. It's a very, very, very, very serious contributor to crime. And then the problem with the other forms of addiction, of course, is that as you become addicted and fall out of the

out of society and you still need to pay for your drugs, you're going to, there's the temptation to turn to crime to generate the proceeds necessary for you to get your next hit is going to loom large. And you know that's catastrophic too because even from the economic perspective because it's very hard for people to steal anything now that has any value.

Right? I mean, you steal a TV from someone's house and you pawn it off. There's no value in it at all. And so the cost of crime is much, much greater than the benefit to the criminal. And that's getting worse and worse. And so, okay, so there's a massive association between addiction and mental health problems, broadly speaking. And

criminality and like active criminality, but also the kind of passive criminality that I think constitutes tent cities, for example. That's the breakdown of social norms, the occupation of public lands, the general decrease in the civility of common life that's associated with widespread despair and catastrophe on the streets, especially in a place like Alberta that's so bloody bitterly cold.

So, you know, how in the world do you live out in the streets through an Alberta winter? You can hardly live inside a house in an Alberta winter. So, okay, so you went to the corrections facility, and we want to get back to the oxycodone story. Sure, and so I'll just make this point broadly because you went down asking about the Alberta model and what it is. It fundamentally is an assumption that we need to address the addiction crisis seriously.

To understand why it's been such a problem, we have to look at how oxycodone crisis turned into a second crisis within Canada that was propagated and aggravated by the federal government with their policies. We are fundamentally saying that addiction is a part of

the crisis that individuals face. And if you try and do housing first, as Minister Nixon made the point, without addressing addiction, right, you're going to end up in a very, very difficult spot, right? You need to say, I mean, the nature of an addiction, if we're talking about an opioid addiction, I mean, many people who are addicted to opioids lose a fifth to a quarter of their body weight because they don't have a desire to eat or drink.

because the dopamine hit you get is 200% increase from your baseline level when you do an opioid. I mean, imagine if this conversation was the best conversation we'd ever had, the most stimulating ever. That would be 25% increase in our dopamine maybe off our baseline from what I understand. You're talking about something eight times as compelling. Of course, no one's going to want to have a conversation or eat a burger or drink water or have sex or continue to hold down

a paying job and be a part of society when you're still in active addiction. That's particularly true if they're isolated, right, and have already fallen out of society to some degree. So the rat literature indicated pretty convincingly that it was actually pretty hard to addict rats that were in their wild habitat to cocaine.

But if you isolated them in a cage, you could get them addicted to cocaine to the point where they would only self-administer cocaine and they wouldn't do anything else. Barely drink, certainly not eat, certainly not be interested in sex. And so if you're dealing with people who are alienated, who aren't integrated into a community that allows them alternative forms of genuine reward than the

And dopaminergic chemicals become that much more attractive. And if you want to look at examples of that, just look at Western society that atomizes everyone increasingly. And there are all sorts of benefits to the personal autonomy that we have in society, but increasingly we're more isolated than we've ever been. And COVID was...

Pardon the expression, that on steroids. It was so much more so this isolation that happened. And addiction is fundamentally a disease of isolation. And the antidote to that is recovery, which is a community relationship again. Right. In some way. Community and purpose. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's get to that question around... Draw the line between the oxycodone over prescription and the government policies that facilitated the development of the opiate...

opioid crisis. Now, is that associated with the policies that, say, characterize Vancouver, where drugs are distributed, what, widely and easily? That is the understatement of the decade, to say widely and easily. So the oxycodone crisis created a North American opioid pandemic. The authority on this is a Stanford Lancet commission written by Dr. Keith Humphreys,

who is a professor seen to be a universally accepted expert when it comes to the opioid crisis in North America. It's distinctly North American as a crisis. There are aspects of this that we see in other parts of the world, but we see the opioid crisis created a market for opioid users that wasn't just that Toronto, Vancouver, L.A., New York for that heroin.

heroin market that would have existed. Instead, everyone that had a prescription, i.e. everyone with a pharmacy, dispensary, and a family physician, and anyone who had pain in their life, there now was a market for that. And we saw a massive explosion. And so one of the axiomatic truths of addiction broadly, and it is on full display with the late 90s, nearly 2000s,

is if you increase supply to a market and you don't have barriers there, then you're going to increase harm. Addiction will come out of that. And it's just axiomatic. You can't get around it. So if you massively dump high-powered opioids, twice as powerful as heroin, into every single community, and you start with a trusted institution prescribing these, your family physician prescribing

passing them out en masse with huge amounts of diversion, which means to say the person who was prescribed the opioid doesn't receive the opioid. Instead, it gets traded or marketed to some other individual. You're creating a new addict. And the way that the addiction works, especially with opioids, is it continues to ratchet up.

and it escalates. And so you might become tolerant after a while of receiving heroin or twice as powerful oxycodone, so you take twice as many of those pills. And after a time, you saw a massive resurgence of the heroin market across all of North America. And is that what opened the door to fentanyl?

And so fentanyl is just a much, much more powerful version of heroin. So if you look at oxycodone, which is twice as powerful as heroin, thereabouts, fentanyl is about 100 to 200 times more powerful than that. And so as tolerance continues to escalate in a using population, there are very clever chemists and illicit chemists that are going to find a new high-powered opioid that will be able to satiate that desire.

And so if you are using over a long period of time, months and years, you no longer can get a high off of that lower price.

powered opioid. So you need to be seeking more and more. And fentanyl is one of them, but there's su-fentanyl and carfentanil and some clever chemist that's going to create something even more damaging afterwards. It's not just that the opioid gives you that dopamine hit and that high that we talked about. If that was all it was, there would be all sorts of difficulties in managing that because of its addictive properties.

But the opioid also can access different receptors in the brain, as you well know. And one of those receptors are what depress your respiration. And so if you get a really powerful opioid, like say fentanyl, that's hundreds of times more powerful than heroin, then your breathing will stop to the point where you don't pump blood through your chest anymore and your veins don't deliver that oxygen into your brain. You will have cerebral hypoxia.

which is akin to drowning in daylight. You're suffocating for air in your brain, and that's what an opioid overdose is. And so... That's running rampant on the West Coast. And fentanyl is particularly bad at this, right? And so we had a few factors come together. The failure of the institutions that were meant to protect us...

the academic institutions that train physicians, the colleges that regulate physicians, the regulatory bodies, the regulatory bodies that regulate the access to drugs themselves. And it went unchecked for over a decade and created a mass market. And this is like a slow-moving freight train towards our healthcare system and towards your family and your community members that end up

hooked on an addiction to an opioid. And we know that that addiction will escalate. And that addiction, run its course, has only one of two ends. And if someone says otherwise, they're lying to you and maybe even to themselves. The addiction, run its course, either ends in pain, misery, and given enough time, death, through an overdose, or some other ancillary consequence like not eating or lacerations from living intensity, you name it.

that happens, trauma lives in addiction. The alternative to that, and it's the only alternative given enough time, is treatment, recovery from your addiction, and that second lease on life, to be a community member again, to be a brother or a mother. One of the reliable findings in the alcohol addiction treatment literature, virtually no treatments for alcoholism work. But that doesn't mean that people don't recover.

And one of the primary pathways to recovery, and this has been known, I would say, for seven or eight decades, is something approximating religious transformation.

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This has been well known among researchers who have no stake in the matter from a religious perspective. And there's a reason for that. The reason is that the drugs of abuse, like alcohol, if you're prone to it, have this dopaminergic kick that you're describing. So dopamine kicks in when you see yourself moving towards a valued goal. And so that feels good, but it also affects

reinforces the development of the neural systems that underlie that movement. So if you do something and it works, it makes you feel good, but the systems that you use to do that grow, and dopamine does both of those. Okay, so you experience a dopamine kick when you're moving towards a valued goal. And so what that... that has some implications. One implication is, if you have no valued goals, you have no access to dopamine kick.

Right. So now if you're drinking or you're addicted, you're falsely stimulating these systems. Now you need that kick. Well, that's what people live for in many ways. It's part of what gives them the sense of purposeful action. Well, the substitution of a new purpose actually works.

reduces the craving pharmacologically because it activates the same systems. And so you need, you can't just stop using a drug. You have to stop using a drug and find something to do that's

a replacement or better. Better would be best. Okay, now. Yeah, and that's exactly right. But it's worse than that in a way too, because it's not just that it gives you a natural dopamine kick that you could have. It gives you this synthetic, heightened, which drives an addiction.

to a way where nobody, even in the most fulfilled life that they could have of purpose with a family and children they're raising, thinks, I don't want to eat today because I want to spend more time with my family, right? It's not overriding. And so that dopamine kick is super problematic. And so if you deal with that without replacing it with some purpose and without a sense of how you plan to treat it, you will just continue to escalate and

the tolerance you get, because your body tells you there's too much dopamine going on. I need to react. So you're going to start shutting down some of those opioid receptors. You're not going to be able to get as big of a kick. Again, that's why it's so particularly dangerous when you talk about overdose deaths, is that the opioids will force you into a spot where you are risking life every single time. We had one individual in Alberta that overdosed 186 times that we know of last year.

Now, an overdose means, again, you're drowning in daylight. Your brain can't get oxygen. You can't breathe, right? And so we doubt that that is...

all the times that person's overdosed, probably more. Because every time someone overdoses, there's not always a healthcare worker there saying, can I have your provincial healthcare number, please? There are many reversals with naloxone kits that happen all the time. So we see individuals like that that continue to escalate. That doesn't start overnight. That happens because there's been no intervention. Because the state is

The system, the wider culture just continues to facilitate the addiction. And the addiction, run its course, has got one, two ends. You end up in recovery, you end up dead. And so I don't want to put my eggs in helping people continue the path of ending up dead. As a minister, I have a moral responsibility to support and where I can intervene to get someone into recovery.

And that means building a very big healthcare system that is going to help people get into that state of recovery. Okay, so now when I talk to Jason Nixon...

It was just a couple of months after Alberta had started to take down the tent cities. Okay, so it's been about a year. So tell me what the situation is with regards to taking down the tent cities. And like, is it, what's the status of Alberta at the moment, Edmonton, Calgary, Peace River, Grand Prairie, with regards to homeless encampments? And then walk us through what happened

people who are in the throes of addiction would be offered or could expect as a consequence of this model. Just walk us through it step by step. I want to get to that, but we haven't told the full story that got us to where we are. And so I want to get that first, because then before we get to the solution, we don't fully understand the problem. We had one failure so far around colleges and regulatory bodies, etc. That created the market.

And then if we skip forward about a decade after 1995 when oxycodone started, you look at the policy response in Canada. And this is what's beginning to develop as a response to the mass induction of uptake of opioids across the entire North American continent.

And we look at Insight in 2003, which is known as a safe injection site or drug consumption site. And Vancouver, as you described, is very progressive, West Coast, Left Coast. And they came up with the idea of saying, we're going to create an exemption to the Criminal Code of Canada. And we're going to establish a supervised drug consumption site. So HIV, AIDS or other different communicable diseases we want to reduce. But importantly, we want to be there to reverse overdoses.

That idea didn't come out of nowhere. The end of the war on drugs happened across all of North America and that these drugs, cocaine and then increasingly opioids, are too dense and too potent and too valuable and profitable for us to really prohibit on the supply side. It was really difficult to stop these drugs from coming into our market. And the demand was there. It was created, right? And so we saw a resurgence of heroin, for example, massively across the entire continent.

And this was paired with the harm reduction model, which says if people are going to use, we need to make sure we reduce the harmful outcomes that happen. So needle exchanges, needle cleanups, and it became articulated in Canada, especially in Vancouver initially, with exemptions to the criminal code for certain sites around drug consumption sites.

And so this idea said, if people are using, let's help them do it safely. And from that point on, the literature was really clear across all of Canada. And the policies that government set were also very clear across all of Canada. We need to facilitate the minimizing of harm.

The problem is if you take that to its logical conclusion, you end up with what we're seeing in Canada now. For example, funded by the federal government in Ontario and in British Columbia, a program called Safer Supply, which I call Unsafe Supply. So we talked about oxycodone before as this mass high-powered pharmaceutical grade opioid. Well, the new drug that's being handed out

which you referenced earlier, is called hydromorphone. It's five times as powerful as heroin. It's an incredibly impotent pharmaceutical-grade opioid. And so the policy that they created said the extension of harm reduction was harm reduction to say, if the problem is a bunch of overdoses from, say, fentanyl, because it has that really, really tragic outcome that fentanyl users are really at risk of overdose and potentially, tragically, death, then we have to stop the toxic drug supply.

And they framed it in this really, really nefarious way. And I think this is fundamentally the problem. It's an abusive language that frames it across the entire country. And if you watch CBC or National Broadcast or any other outlet, or you look at academic research, they're trying to have us use really, really inorganic, inauthentic language to talk about the addiction crisis. They will say it's not an addiction crisis. The problem instead is a toxic drug supply.

They say that if we just didn't have a toxic drug supply, it would be fine. So obviously, if the problem is a toxic drug supply on one side, the solution is a safe drug supply on the other. So safe supply is where that term comes from. So they hand out this pharmaceutical-grade, pure, high-powered, five times more powerful than heroin version of an opioid called hydromorphone. And in, say, Vancouver this last year, there was approximately 50%,

54 million 8 milligram pills that were passed out. Countrywide, we're approximating about 100 million pills mass distributed. So half of them were distributed in this manner in Vancouver? Yeah. There are many different sites. In fact, any pharmacy can distribute them because you get a prescription from it. And the idea is it's unwitnessed, high-powered pharmaceutical-grade opioids in an attempt to say, if you're using fentanyl, we'd rather have you use the safe,

Well, the problem is, as you well know, if fentanyl is 100 times more powerful than the hydromorphone, the high you get from fentanyl is the sun compared to a candle.

with a hydromorphone. It's nowhere near powerful enough. It can barely even deal with withdrawal symptoms. And so instead of displacing the fentanyl use, what you've done is you've given a whole bunch of individuals who are in active opioid addiction, who have such a drive to continue seeking that dopamine kick,

that they will take the high-power-grade safe supply, so-called, and trade it to an illicit drug dealer, the drug cartels, and say, I still want my fentanyl. Now, the drug cartels have tens or hundreds of millions of high-power-grade opioids that they can repurpose and sell themselves. It used to be that hydromorphone, before the safe supply program in 2020, that used to be approximately $15 to $20 a pill.

If you go to downtown East Hastings now, the latest media reports say that it's about $1 a pill. So you can see what it's done flooding the market with high power grade opioids. The tragedy is, is that the political activists on the progressive left and the academics who are trying to ratchet this up

They will admit that the opioid crisis began with oxycodone, with mass supply, unwitnessed, and diverted access to tens of millions and hundreds of millions of pills.

of pills across North America for a decade. And that created a whole bunch of new users that as a slow freight train, as soon as you start an opioid, unless you get into recovery, it continues down this tragic end towards death. And so what happened again, they've created those same circumstances.

But instead of it being unwitting physicians who are told by the regulatory officers and told by the academics that this is going to be safe, it's now the government funding it with tax dollars, pushing it into communities with mass diversion of high-powered opioids. And so we've seen the movie before, and we're witnessing it again. And we've had the RCMP, the Canadian police force, have drug seizures of tens of thousands of pills,

from safe supply, unsafe supply, that the drug cartels plan on repurposing for resale in British Columbia and in other neighboring provinces, which includes Alberta. And so we now have this sort of aggravation of a devastating problem. They've poured fuel on a dumpster fire in a way that would have been difficult to have done intentionally much, much worse.

It is probably one of the worst things you could do because the axiomatic rule that we know from the Stanford Lancet Commission and from research worldwide around addiction is if you increase supply without barriers and you have mass diversion of high-powered, high-grade pharmaceutical opioids in your community, that it will cause more harm, more addiction.

And so that is a failure now of not just the regulatory bodies, but of the government, the elected officials themselves in the government in Ottawa, the federal government under Trudeau Liberals, and the BCNDP, amongst others, that are making it much, much worse. And it's demonstrably true. If you leave Canada...

There's not a country in the world that thinks that this is a good idea. And if you look at the research, whether you're talking to Harvard, as I did last month, or Connecticut, where I went to talk to Yale, or you look at Stanford and the work being done by Keith Humphreys,

or a number of others internationally, this is very well known. And so this entire set of policies of harm reduction started off with the best of intentions. But in the end, instead of it being harm reduction, it's become harm production when it gets to unsafe supply, when it gets to an expansion of drug consumption sites on every street corner. If you look at this, it's a uniquely Canadian policy setting. And so Canada has more drug consumption sites than the rest of the world combined. Right.

And it is uniquely Canadian. It's been on offer across the world. California has looked at this and has implemented and reversed. It is not something that you see in Europe widespread. And if you do, it's places like Switzerland, which has witnessed some very, very different from what we see in Canada. And so Canada was in desperate need of an alternate solution.

Because the policy on offer was an utter disaster and getting worse and worse and worse. And it was getting worse in large part because of the policies the government was enacting to try and fix it. And if you look at the safe supply, the so-called safe supply policies now, B.C. Henry, the chief medical officer of health of COVID fame in B.C., is pushing this unsafe supply.

And one of her last reports- She's one of the most devoted ideologues in Canada. She is really quite a piece of work. It is surreal because one of her last reports has finally admitted, and despite the fact that it was abundantly clear from the very start, that diversion is and would be commonplace. Of course it would. We're talking about high-powered opioids everywhere.

un-witnessed given to those in active addiction, right? There was going to be mass diversion and therefore many new individuals beginning onto this tragic opioid addiction. Her solution is, well, we need more powerful opioids because no one wants the hydromorphone. So her last report has, I'm not kidding, it is suggesting that we start handing out fentanyl. Well, the whole premise of this harebrained scheme was to displace fentanyl use.

So she's going to hand out safe phantom. None of it's safe. There aren't safe opioids for recreational use. I mean, the science is clear on this. You could say this as a practitioner in the field that high-powered opioids recreationally are dangerous to you. Always, at any time a substance becomes addictive, it's dangerous to you. Of course it is. Addiction is a life-threatening disease and it needs treatment.

And so it's now gotten to the point where it does not matter whether it's a drug cartel or Justin Trudeau, whether it is the black market or Bonnie Henry, the chief medical officer of health in British Columbia, that is handing out the drugs. Physiologically, it has the same effect on you. It will have the same catastrophic carnage in your life and it will destroy your community in the same way. And Alberta in that setting.

is now starting to address the addiction crisis. Okay, so I think you should take us through the alternative model in some detail so that people who are listening, who are interested in this topically or on the policy side, have some sense of exactly how to do this. And so do we start with the story of the tent cities and what you guys have been doing to

to help the people who have found themselves in that position? Or where's a good entry point? I mean, the place to start is an addiction anthropology. It's assuming the nature of addiction. And if you get that right or you get that wrong, your policies will either be helpful when executed well or a complete and utter disaster.

And so the addiction anthropology of the radical side of this, the radical activist says that it's not an addiction crisis at all. The anthropology is it's simply a problem of an unsafe supply and we can facilitate addiction indefinitely.

which is why ever-increasing drug consumption sites in every street corner is a solution, along with drug unsafe supply being handed out by the government at taxpayer expense. Because addiction isn't really the problem in their mind. They frame it completely inauthentically and cynically as nothing but a toxic drug supply problem.

I do not care whether someone is addicted to an opioid or pornography. It does not matter to me whether their crisis is something that's generated from homelessness and a mental health issue or if it is somebody working a nine to five that got a prescribed opioid because of a blue collar job works at injury.

I want to be able to meet them where they're at and get them health care. Ostensibly, and this is a bold statement in Canada, ostensibly, health care should be about healing people and getting them healthy. That has unfortunately, in my neck of the woods, when it comes to mental health and addiction, not always been the first hack of the experts in the field. And that's a policy failure and an institutional failure of the academics.

And so the nature of addiction is that it is a disease that is recoverable. And that's why the Alberta recovery model is the heart of what we're talking about. And so as we see the factors in society of individual autonomy continuing as we move forward in the 21st century, as we saw tragedies like COVID isolate people even further, it's become abundantly clear that unless you bring some sort of antidote to that,

purpose in life, a sense of community, relationship built again, you will continue to see addiction crises getting worse, especially when really addictive substances are handed up by the government en masse. And you can look at examples in British Columbia where you saw a 14-year-old underage girl die

because she got addicted to unsafe supply. You can see that the BC Health Authority for a 12-year-old who recently passed away in British Columbia was given drug paraphernalia so that she could continue to use. That was the state response to the addiction of minors.

And Alberta has said instead, the state response is addiction is rampant, it's widespread. And it's gonna continue to be unless we give people an off ramp out of addiction. And so whether we're talking about individuals who have zero recovery capital, people who are living intermittently homeless, maybe they're from a neck of the woods up Northwestern Alberta, they might have an indigenous background,

and they are maybe suffering from mental health crisis, maybe psychosis brought on by the drug use or pre-existed, maybe they're disposed to an addiction already.

those individuals have next to no recovery capital. They're not holding on a job, they don't have family, they've lost almost all connection to everyone else. There needs to be an intervention in those individuals' lives. And interventions come in all shapes and sizes, whether you're talking about a run-in with the justice system, or you talk about a healthcare crisis they run into. - Right, there's gonna be an intervention of one form or another. - Of course, and families, I mean, if you look at, for example, the most successive addiction treatment programs,

The literature shows it's industries like the airline industry that say if you are caught trying to fly a plane high or drunk or using some sort of mind-altering substance, then the risk of your license being revoked is incredibly high. You have a mandatory treatment you must do afterwards at risk of being rejected from that employer and from the industry. And so an intervention can come in that form for some people with more recovery capital, people who still have some capacity.

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The state needs to be there to support, with the broader society, individuals that don't have that ability, that institution, maybe that workplace environment, to get them into the opportunity to recover as well. So you don't hold any kind of hope, a snowball chance in hell, of trying to help people through their crisis if you don't address that fundamental heart of a problem, which is some sort of trauma, some sort of issue driving them to addiction.

And so most of the addiction treatment we do after medical detox, it's one disease of addiction, right? And it doesn't matter whether it's a process addiction like, you know, eye gaming, for example, or it's an opioid addiction. When you get through that medical detoxification process,

So much of it's social psychopathy. And how is that undertaken? How is the medical detoxification undertaken? So if you're taking people off the street, for example, if they're homeless, what's the first, and addicted, what's the first step in the process? The first step is building a network of detox centers and stabilization across the province. So since we came into power in 2019, we've increased approximately 50% of our treatment capacity. That's about 10,000 spaces per annum.

that we have in Alberta. Per annum? Per annum. And this is distributed in the major urban centers? It would be across the entire province. And the majority of those are detox spaces because they're short episodes of stay. Detox is just the first step to moving towards that. How long does that typically last? It could be a week, perhaps less, sometimes two weeks. That's medically supervised? Yeah, medically supervised. In Alberta, we have a license regime for this.

And so if it's talking about alcohol or benzos, that is a much, much more precarious situation. There could be all sorts of really negative health outcomes if it's not done with appropriate medical supervision. But that could last, say, a couple of days to two weeks.

Once that happens, we're building a network. We have now funded mass amounts of not-for-profits, community-based treatment centers of all different varieties. Many of them are Indigenous, some are faith-based, some are not. We have no particular predilection towards what that looks like beyond being about recovery.

And I'm trying to get people into help. So you're experimenting with a variety of different approaches? We're allowing lots of different providers to come into the space. How do you evaluate the consequences? So we have My Recovery Plan, which is a metric we're using to talk about someone's recovery capital. So we're seeing a lot of it is subjective analysis of where are you at now? Where do you want to be? We have hard metrics as well that go into that analysis.

And the idea is that as we build out this recovery continuum, all along the way, right from the very first time you get into detox all the way to a year later, when you look at the end of treatment in your post-recovery housing, integrating the community, are you seeing recovery capital continue? Because right now, tragically, the only metric really used across Canada, I'd say probably across all of North America, is overdose deaths.

which obviously I want to see as few as possible. That's why I'm about the compassionate option of giving everyone a chance at recovery. But before, that's a latent indicator. You're talking about overdose reversals and overdose deaths. I mean, I want to be able to see before someone gets there, how are we doing? Are they steering in the right direction? So do you look at

So your indicators, you talk about, let's delve into the issue of recovery capital a bit. So, you know, you mentioned that people are homeless, family-less, with no economic ties and no friends, okay? So they're not, they have no integration whatsoever into the community at any level. So part of what recovery capital sounds like in your formulation is,

of what, their embeddedness in the social structure? Yeah, that's very right. It's their embeddedness in the social structure, it's relationships and connections to outside, it's a sense of purpose in their life, and to a degree, an achievement of that in their life, right? Right. And you want to be able to measure that through subjective and objective measurements as much as you can. And much of the treatment when it comes to addiction, as I mentioned, it is...

After that medical detox, it is social, it's psycho, it is relational. And so it's really important that we're seeing, are people heading in the right direction before they end up in an emergency room and on death's door with an overdose and cerebral hypoxia where they are drowning in daylight. That is a horrible way for a policymaker to start looking just to that metric.

I need to be considering that as an end state of making sure we don't end there. But also, way before that, and I'm not even talking about early intervention prevention, I'm talking about those in addiction. Can we steer their recovery capital to a positive earlier? How are people signing up, so to speak? If I remember correctly, when I talked to Mr. Nixon, some of those tend to count...

were actually being dismantled by the government and people were being bussed with their family, with their dog to treatment center, multi-dimensional treatment center. To a navigation center. Yeah. And so this navigation center was a hub. And from there, you could get a number of different supports. I mean, if maybe you're ID-less, you need an ID. But also, if you were someone interested in detox, then we are there to sort of intervene and say, let's help you get to that space.

It can be difficult to manage. They don't know how. Right, right, right. And the window that someone says, look, because of whatever circumstance, maybe it's the dismantling of the tent that they were living in. Tent is too charitable. I mean, these are open drug sites with drug cartels. Yeah, right, right. Extorting individuals. We shouldn't be talking about tent cities. It's not like going camping on the weekend. They're gang camping.

They're gang encampments. Yeah, yeah. 100%, right? Run by brutal people. With threats of rape. We've had instances of individuals being burnt in them. And tragically, sometimes even death happens through this with extortion of paying taxes to these drug lords. They're lawless encampments run by thugs. Yes. With minus 40 degrees Celsius, right? In the middle of winter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so...

So what happens is they get to this navigation center, it's meant to reroute them. And perhaps, and we've had a number of individuals that say, I want to get treatment now. And the first step to that is going to one of those 10,000 spaces we created. Much of those are going to be detox. From there, we're going to be connecting them to a network of recovery communities and therapeutic living communities across the province.

We even have inside our provincial correction facilities or prisons, we have units that are dedicated to those who voluntarily want to take on recovery as an opportunity. And you go to these places and I've never been more emotionally touched in my life with the hard work these young men are taking to say, I could be looking at porn and getting high in the rest of the facility, but I've decided instead I want to re-enact my

family when I get out. I have an estranged family member. I have children I want to be able to see. I know between my crime and my addiction, this is going to be a disaster and it's just going to continue on. And they voluntarily say, I want into this therapeutic living unit. And we have them in Red Deer. We have them in Port Saskatchewan. They're in the prisons. And we have, for lack of a better expression, a captive audience. And we...

we give that opportunity for individuals to say, I want to start working on my addiction and into recovery. - How many people in that? - Well, we have about three open right now, and there's anywhere from 11 in some, all the way to 20 in others.

And that's an expanding program in principle? We're continuing to expand across the entire system. The idea is that across the whole continuum, I want to give everyone an opportunity at recovery because the alternative to recovery is unconscionable. And there's a moral imperative we have. This isn't just dollars and cents in economics. It's not simply a public safety question. It is.

Because Canadians and Albertans deserve not to have to, you know, cross in front of the gentleman fencing with the wind with a used syringe, speedballing methamphetamine and fentanyl. Instead, they should be able to know that going into the Main Street shopping center or the recreation center for swimming lessons for little Jimmy or Sue should be absolutely a safe thing to do.

But beyond that as well... Parks as well. Absolutely. Beyond that, I mean, informed by my principle as a Canadian, as an Albertan, and I'd say as a conservative, I believe in the dignity of every single life. And that's inalienable. It cannot be divorced from someone no matter what actions they've taken. And it's society's job to help that. And one function of that in government is to say, let's build this capacity. So we're building 11 long-term, high-quality, free-access,

drug and addiction recovery treatment centers. For those who are in active addiction, who have gone through detox, they start a very long phase of addiction, anywhere from months to up to one year. And the data shows really clearly that if you can get...

The more time you have in sobriety and where you have, say, opioid agonist therapy, which I'd be happy to talk more about the innovative program we have there, which is help for those who have addiction medically so that they can have reprieve from that desire to continue seeking the opioid high. What are you using? We're using, well, there's methadone, but methadone.

increasingly more we're using sublocate sublocate is a buprenorphine buprenorphine product it's an injectable subcutaneous and it gives you 30 days of slow dispense all the way through you don't need to show up at the dispensary daily it continues 30 days because addictive potential for it

incredibly low, almost non-existent. You cannot get high on it. Okay, and it's mostly a craving reduction? So it reduces cravings, but it also protects because the affinity in the opioid receptors is higher for the buprenorphine than it is for the opioid. Oh, so it's a blocker too? So it's a blocker. So you cannot continue. Overdose is incredibly hard.

when you're on this. And for many individuals... And it's 30 days. 30 days. Oh, yeah, that's... I mean, protection continues even past that, but 30 days, I think, is what the label requires. And so the value of that is it gives them a breath of fresh air. It allows those who have this physiological pull to continue seeking the addiction to say...

not only do I have reprieve from the withdrawal symptoms, not only do I have a reprieve from the desire to continue seeking the opioid, if I try, I can't even get high, I'm going to give this a good shot. And so when you look at opioid agonist therapy and our data that we have at the Canadian Centre Recovery Excellence surrounding good outcomes with sublocade is incredibly good. We're going to be publishing on it, partnering with institutions to do that.

But when you pair that opioid agonist treatment, that medical treatment, along with social psychotherapy, it's incredibly good for outcomes. We see it like they just come together in this synergy that allows much better outcomes. And so if we support individuals in detox and we get them onto the virtual opioid dependency program to give them a breath of fresh air with that medical treatment,

and then we get them into one of our long-term recovery centers, and then we support them through Minister Nixon in long-term recovery housing, you can get to 24 months. You see the rate of long-term recovery in the data is incredibly high by comparison. You get to that two-year mark, and you see long-term recovery is much, much, much more likely. How likely? What are you looking at now? I mean, look, we should preface this by saying that for most addictive treatment treatments,

the risk of relapse is overwhelming. People can go through detoxification, they can go through withdrawal, they can even stay drug-free if they're away from the normative structures of their community, but as soon as you put them back in their community, they tend to relapse, right? And so the reason I'm letting everybody know that is because I want to preface your description of the statistics with the observation that this is a very difficult thing to do.

The probability of failure is extremely high. And so what kind of success are you having? So our program is relatively new. We need to make a distinction between a single instance of recidivism versus long-term recovery, right? And so there could be instances. Most people who live into long-term recovery will have multiple instances of recidivism before they really end up in that long-term recovery.

Period. So over, I mean, data can show and there's no example that has the full continuum of care that Alberta is building out, which is why our data collection and long-term longitudinal studies along with the Canadian Centre for Recovery Excellence is going to be so important to prove this out.

Yeah. But I mean, some data shows over 50%. If you look at a different instance, you look at, um, maybe the original therapeutic living community in San Paterano in Italy. I believe the data they showed me when I spoke to them, uh, from this study from the university of Bologna shows long-term recovery rates are at over 72% last time they studied. That's a three year stay, um,

in a very long-term and very community-oriented living recovery community in Italy. So really good data when you have long periods of treatment. We haven't really seen this in North America to that degree yet. The idea of therapeutic living communities is coming back in the literature as one of the most exciting opportunities to build recovery into an addiction treatment policy. Okay, so let's close this then with a discussion of

pitfalls, you know, because one of the things that's rattling around in the back of my head is how do you reconcile this relatively interventionist strategy, let's say, with

the minimalist approach to government intervention that often characterizes conservatism. Right? And so, you know, you can see a philosophical conundrum there, but then you can also see a practical conundrum because a conservative skeptic might say, well, what you're implementing is another bureaucratic growth community that's going to expand at the rate of 10% a year indefinitely with, you know, with dubious outcome. Like it's just, so, so 10%,

Tell me how you reconcile that philosophically. And then tell me what you think you guys have done to, what would you say, protect against the pitfalls that might

that might accrue as a consequence of building another adjunct to the healthcare system. Right. So the healthcare system, fundamentally, the entire premise of peace, order, and good governance comes from the idea that each of us have dignity unto itself. Conservatism, I would say, from my mind, is not a form of libertarianism. Conservatism is fundamentally an idea that people have intrinsic dignity, that we should labor towards the common good.

And so one of the lies that we've been told in addiction across North America, and it's really true when you look at this sort of radical activist claim on the progressive left, is that

Canadians have a choice. You can either be compassionate towards those in addiction or have safe communities, right? And Canadians, as you said, are level-minded, reasonable people that want to trust the institutions and want to trust the authorities. It's a part of the heritage that we grew out of as a part of a colony within the British Empire. The institutions we've built have largely worked up to now. Of course we want to do that. And that is the lie. That is the false dichotomy that's there. In fact,

caring for those who are in addiction and being compassionate towards them and having safe communities are one and the same. Because there's nothing compassionate about having the individual who is not in any moral way a free agent, choosing to drink water or not the way you and I have today, choosing whether or not to vote for the conservatives or the liberals. There is no free agency in that same way for those who are suffering, who are in the worst articulations of active addiction. And so,

Society needs to intervene in that sense because they're vulnerable in the same way that we would want to protect anyone who is vulnerable, especially if we talked about those who are underage. We talk about those who have been compromised and don't have the agency and the capacity to make decisions for themselves. That is what a well-ordered state does, and it does it through compassionate mechanisms.

So first of all, the lie has been put there in the first place. You have to choose between the two. But it's not enabling compassion. Like, it's really important to distinguish between compassion and enabling. I mean, the psychoanalysts have been doing that for like 100 years. If your brand of compassion is...

okay, dear, you can do whatever terrible thing you want and I won't intervene because I don't want to hurt your feelings. That's not compassion. That's, I don't even know how to describe that. Well, it's enabling. It's a devouring form of enabling. And so like the compassionate thing often to do with someone who's in real trouble is to use judgment. Right?

Right. And to think, well, no, that's pretty much got to come to a stop. This is not acceptable and we need to do something about it. And so that's partly why I think the Alberta approach is so interesting. Francis George, an American clergyman, once said that fundamentally our society is one that permits and allows and encourages everything, but forgives nothing.

And I think that there's something really transcendent about that. It's fully on display here. Fundamentally, the idea of the addiction anthropology adopted by the left is that those in addiction, we need to sort of continue to palliate their addiction indefinitely with higher and higher powered opioids. That's the most radical articulation of what was called harm reduction. And in that state becomes a harm production, right? That's not the case. From my perspective, is that...

Instead of just saying everything's permitted, an important redress to addiction is that there are consequences for actions. Now, I'm not saying this as a minister of justice. I don't want to criminalize this, but continuing to just destroy your life and cause threats and harm to your community more broadly shouldn't be permitted in society. And the consequence of that is going to be an intervention. Right. So that's the conservative edge of it, I would say, philosophically as well, is that

these tent encampments, these gang encampments are threats to civil order. Like fundamentally on the criminal side, on the civil side,

Also, with regard to their capacity to undermine our sense of a high-trust society. And a high-trust society is an incredibly valuable resource. And fleeting. Oh, and easy to disrupt, like terribly easy to disrupt. And it's just not acceptable for the public landscape to be littered with, what would you say, with the evidence of systemic racism.

and civilizational collapse in the form of homeless people who are completely overcome by their fentanyl-induced

induced pathology. There's nothing about that that's acceptable. That fentanyl induced pathology, as you describe it, I would say as a public communicator, that individual that overdosed 186 times, the 187th time might be death, right? And so the alternative to treatment is tragedy,

Those are our two options here, which is why I'm going to be introducing legislation next spring. Tragedy by omission. That's the complex thing. We can just let you die or help you die. I mean, that's the assumptions that they've said. There's no problem with just continuing to facilitate addiction as long as it's a safe drug indefinitely. That's not my assumption. My assumption is instead that that life is valuable. It has dignity. We ought to help it.

We have to help all individuals and health care should heal and not harm, which these assumptions are radical when you talk about the public health policies across all of Canada, for sure.

I'm going to be introducing legislation called compassion intervention. And so if somebody is a danger to themselves or others due to their substance use or addiction within a reasonable amount of time are going to cause harm to themselves or others, then it's our society's responsibility to intervene. Because the alternative to that intervene, intervention is tragedy, it's death.

It's also other forms of societal intervention, because those people are going to come to the attention of the public health or the health care system at some point in the ER, or they're going to come to the attention of the police and the judicial authorities. There isn't an obvious no intervention pathway here. That's right. It's earlier or later. And I guess the...

The intervention also needs to, right now, if you tell someone struggling with an opioid addiction that after they get arrested because of, say, a criminal act that they were pursuing and trying to seek for more opioids or you name it, and you say, well, Jordan, about six months from now, there's a 25% chance that a court might slap your wrist.

Right. And then you have effectively bail for zero consequences and you get to continue to do what you're doing. What would you do if you're an opioid addict? Well, of course, you just continue what you're doing. That's future Jordan's problem. This Jordan today has got an issue where I need to find some fentanyl. Right. And so instead of that, right, we need to have a system that has

a true recourse to treatment and recovery. So the policy that I'm planning to introduce is say if you're a danger to yourself or others and there are appropriate checks and balances to make sure it's not abused, then we have an obligation as a society, a moral obligation to say we will not let you continue to destroy your life that 187th time that you overdose and die. We will not let you risk public safety because of erratic psychosis induced

from the methamphetamines or name the drug that you're high on. We instead are going to help you through this intervention. And it could come in less formal ways. It could come through an airline industry with standards and regulations that force this and say there's not a 40% chance six months from now.

It could come from a law like the one I'm planning to introduce that says, instead of just turning you through a system that has no real recourse to help you or bring back confidence to our system and our institutions in Canada, the recourse will have a consequence.

The consequence is one that is charitable, one that is compassionate, one that brings long-term likelihood of success for you and for our community. - When are you introducing that? - This spring. - As a homeowner, some of the most tedious and easily forgotten maintenance tasks are often the most important. Take gutter cleaning. It's one of those out of sight, out of mind chores that can lead to serious issues if neglected.

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That's a free inspection and up to 30% off at leaffilter.com slash build. See representative for warranty details. Promotion is 20% off plus a 10% senior or military discount. One discount per household. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And at what point, what point do you think that I'm thinking about reevaluating this, say at some point in the future, at what point do you think that you're the data that you're producing is going to be of sufficient value?

quality and magnitude to review intelligently. You have some of it already. We have some of it now. I would say we have some very good data now around the virtual opioid dependency program and others.

When you're talking about the good, sufficient quality of data, you need longitudinal data. That's the nature of this problem, right? And some of the problem, if you look at the really, really bad sort of, I call them community college professors trying to torque this data and trying to argue for unsafe supply. And they position themselves as experts and authorities. This is another institution that has failed dramatically. And Canadians and the

and the West has a lot of blame to lay on academia and the lies that they have pushed ideologically. So if you look at some of the data around unsafe supply, they don't distinguish between opioid agonist therapy and unsafe supply.

and so they say they have the same outcomes of the good, they only track some of this data one or two weeks afterwards. I mean, you don't need to know one or two weeks after an intervention. You need to know after, you know, if you're mass supplying a high-powered opioid unwitnessed,

How are they doing two years later? And so that's the data we need to collect. So I'd say within a few months, we're going to have a lot more data on the early stages of our system. But this is going to continue to be proved out. And we're going to partner with institutions like Harvard and Yale and others to to to

incredibly and internationalized this because this incredible myopic view that we've seen in Canada of these community college professors and activists that have completely claimed the entire space and have not allowed a policy alternative and they bully and, and they degrade and they threaten in terms of how they position this academically. And they condescend, uh,

That needs to stand up to true scrutiny. And if you go international, you see these policies have been on offer. Yeah, yeah. And they don't want anything to do with it for a right reason. Canada has such opportunity. And I think the Conservatives, interestingly, are the group that's bringing forward compassionate social policy. And we're winning. We're winning in Alberta for the first time on an important social debate in decades. Absolutely.

And we're going to continue to face the obstacles of institutions like academia that rail against us, the media that have guidance for using terms like safe supply rather than— Two billion dollar a year government subsidized media, those guys. We are going to continue, and we're going to end up with challenges all the way through, including in the courts, where we see the Supreme Court, unfortunately, has become a place of political activism. Yeah.

Right.

had just sort of watched every single decision made, not through democratic will of the people, not through acts of parliament or legislatures, but instead by fiat and declaration of nine oligarchs in red and white robes in the Supreme Court, dismantle the institutions that we used to trust and continue to push the most radical, and I mean that, truly the most radical policies in the world and defend them. And we will continue to fight against the array of all these different institutions that have

failed Canadians because fundamentally, one, the policy is right, it is working, and that is demonstrably true. Even if you look at opioid overdoses over the last four months of our public reporting in Alberta, we've seen anywhere from 42% to 50% decreases year over year. Whereas you look at BC, you don't see anything near that for obvious reasons.

that it's starting to work. The culture of recovery is working. That's the number one reason we're going to keep doing it, right? That it's working. But secondly, not only is that common sense, not only is it working, it's the right thing to do. And I think conservatives need to appreciate that we have a moral argument to make, that we care compassionately for those who are vulnerable, that when we want to do things... Yeah, the conservatives have got to get better at taking the moral upper hand away from the progressives because they don't have the moral upper hand.

No, they know how to moralize, but they do not come to the debate with any kind of monopoly on the space. And conservatives have abandoned it, and sometimes the conservatives, as a movement broadly across the West, have gotten it wrong.

I'm not defending every instance. What I'm saying is you look at where we are now as a society and it's completely different from your childhood in Canada. When I'm 37 and so you're 30 years older than me, you said, the world you grew up in is categorically different. And there's no reason to think that these radical activists that are completely consumed by this intersectional Marxist ideology...

that populate, whether it be our academic or our activist lobby groups or our courts, there's no way to think that they're going to take the foot off the gas because what they've done has won for so long. And so it's going to require a confidence. You're going to have to know what you're talking about, but you're going to have to also frame this in a moral language that we are doing what is best for those who are vulnerable. We truly care. And the other side has not only abandoned them, it has made it just a...

for those who are suffering from addiction. And this is true across almost every social policy that you look at that the left has controlled in Canada for the last 30, 40 years. And I think there's a wonderful opportunity. And Pierre Polyev is doing a terrific job of articulating this federally. Danielle Smith is doing a terrific job

is doing an incredible job. Just today announced even more policy when it comes to gender and protecting families and protecting young individuals. Great. Oh, today's your day. Announcement today. So there is... The wider population is just craving, not even...

hard-carrying conservatives, Canadians broadly, Albertans broadly, they care about saying this has gone too far and this has pushed me into a spot where it seems unrecognizable. And so the policies that we have to adopt need to be framed in a way that says we care about the common good, we care about our communities, and we are not simply talking about it from a dollars and cents perspective. We care about the welfare of those who are most vulnerable, we care about the success of our community broadly.

And I think that's an exciting thing happening in Canadian politics. And it's Alberta, largely, and this is a great file to demonstrate that we're leading and we're winning. That's an excellent place to stop. So thank you very much for walking us through that. Thank you. Well, it would be very useful. It would be very useful, and I'll do what I can to facilitate it, to facilitate communication about these sorts of programs on the international side. Because what you guys are doing in Alberta is interestingly interesting.

It's revolutionary in an interestingly practical sense, and it would be lovely to see it succeed and be adopted elsewhere. I would say that it is, Alberta is this wonderful place that is grounded in a place of heritage of who we are as a province and these values, but we're willing to be entrepreneurial in that sense. Yeah, right.

You have to give credit to Premier Daniel Smith for taking the lead on this and running with it. That's for sure. Incredible. And Jason Kenney as well before her. When it comes to this addiction file, it was an innovative policy that he spearheaded as well. So I think we've had terrific leadership in our province that has allowed us to get to the spot where we're starting to see the fruits of this, where we see overdose deaths reducing. It's just incredible to see those activists who oppose the policy. They have to explain why they're against it.

40 to 50% overdose deaths for opioids year over year in these last four months. And it's incredible how obvious it puts squarely that this is ideology for them. They don't care about those who are suffering. Sadly, those activists are more committed to an ideology than they are to the dignity of the human person.

they're more committed to their self-aggrandizement for bearing the standards of the ideology than anything else. All right, sir, that was good. Thank you. Very nice talking to you. Absolutely. So we're going to continue this discussion on the Daily Wire side for another half an hour so that you can join us there. I think I'll talk in a bit more detail about the Alberta and Canadian political landscape and the relationship between that and Canada

well, the international culture war, I suppose, for lack of a better word. And so it,

And I'll talk a little bit, too, about what we're doing on the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship front to start to shift the cultural narrative in ways that are already starting to happen in places like Alberta and may happen much more broadly in Canada when Pierre Polyev takes the helm, which is highly likely sometime in the next year, depending on how rapidly Mr. Trudeau continues to degenerate and perish. So, all right, join us on the DataWire side.

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