Thank you very much.
Thank you for your testimony today. As you are aware, we've been studying the opioid crisis across Canada.
Claudette, to your concern, I think our goal as a committee is to bring some concrete recommendations forward to the minister, to Parliament, and to Health Canada to address the crisis.
What I've heard is that the opioid crisis in Canada is absolutely magnified in first nation communities, both in terms of rate of use and lack of treatment.
The frame I've been using for this, which came from one of our earlier presentations in testimony, is that we need to move from a specialized model of addiction treatment to primary care. We need to have primary care physicians and nurses, providing treatment. We need a nationally agreed to and evidence-based treatment plan, so that we are all using the same frame and are moving forward on treatment. There has to be far better access to treatment programs, both from ER referrals and from safe consumption site referrals, so that people are getting follow-up and are not just left in that state of addiction.
Also, there has to be a dramatic increase—and this is what I wanted to come back to—in funding directed to treatment centres, not filtered through a mental health frame but directly to those treatment centres.
Listening to your testimony, I'm looking for specific recommendations to deal with first nation communities. What I heard was that for northern communities in particular it's going to be very difficult to get treatment programs and centres based in those northern communities. I think the terminology was “land-based”. Does that mean services right in those communities? We don't want to fly people out for treatment, right?