I'll speak first to the tamper-resistant things. They don't work. People who are addicted are in tremendous physical, emotional, and mental pain, and that motivates them to get around all those tamper-resistant things. While that may slow some things down in being injected, it doesn't stop them from being abused.
I'll let the others speak to the actual amount that's allotted, but I can say at the community level in Eabametoong, the community has taken money from other projects so that they can pay someone with a master's degree in social work to come in and offer counselling. There is one drug and addictions worker in a community where a survey five years ago found 400 people openly admitting that they had an opioid addiction—one worker. Then there are three mental health workers with various levels of training and ability who are from the community and who work with people in the program.
The program gets funding from Health Canada, and this is at the higher end of the spectrum of them being helpful. The program was on an annual basis, so the people in the program were using their energy every year to write a new proposal. I heard from a mole within Health Canada that the advice was to fund these programs at approximately 60%. I can't swear by that, but I think that was accurate information, so here you have a program that's underfunded and understaffed. We have people on the waiting list who want to join our program. We don't have enough staff to do the direct administration of the Suboxone, so whatever the funding's at, it's not adequate to truly fund a community-based treatment program.
There's the trickle-down thing. Pikangikum, which I'm sure is a first nation most of you have heard about, has a huge housing crisis. I don't know how many new houses they get a year, but there's never been someone who has came in and said that “this is how many houses you need and we're going to build them this year because we know this is why you still have tuberculosis, rheumatic fever, and all these things.”
I think it's the same thing with the addictions treatment. We know how many people are addicted. The communities are aware. They know what they need. Let's fund it adequately. Let's admit that it has to be five-year funding, at the very least, and let's start saving some lives.