Mayor Kennedy Stewart’s February 11th, 2020 News Conference

The following is the full text of Mayor Kennedy Stewart’s remarks to media on February 11, 2021 following the BC Coroner’s 2020 Overdose Report.

Check against delivery.

Thank you all for joining me this morning.

Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge that I am speaking to you from the undecided traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations and I hope you will all join me in thanking them for their continued partnership as we build the future of our great city together.

This is very sad morning as we are discussing tragic loss in our community. It is hard to find anyone living in Vancouver who has not been affected or has lost someone they love.

Despite knowing that the final statistics from the coroner’s office would show 2020 to be the worst year on record for overdose deaths, today’s grim report isn’t any less shocking.

The fact is that the combination of an out-of-control poison drug supply and policy measures designed to reduce the spread of Covid-19 has left 408 of our neighbours dead in Vancouver last year.

408. Think about that for a moment.

But that was just 2020. Since 2010, we have lost more than 2,100 people to this epidemic in our city.

Think about all the people those lives touched. All the parents, siblings, children, and friends.

We mourn the loss of these loved ones who are victims of a long-standing mental health and substance use crisis and a consistently poisoned drug supply.

In brief, this is one of the greatest policy disasters in the history of our province.

We have lost more than 6,500 lives in BC since the province declared a state of emergency in April 2016, with many times that number overdosing and forever changing their lives.

Now while it is getting harder and harder to meet someone who hasn’t been touched by this crisis, a lot of people still might not connect what they are seeing on the streets or in the news with overdoses and COVID-19. But they are intrinsically connected.

Measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19 such as physical distancing guidelines have slashed shelter spaces and prevented guests in SRO rooms, pushing hundreds more people out onto our streets or using drugs on their own.

At the same time, border closures amped up the lethal nature of the street drug supply.

We need to understand the connected nature of overdose deaths and Covid-19 in order to offer more effective solutions.

Now I’m not here today to tell people how sad I am. Although I am incredibly sad. And I’m not here to say how angry, but I am very angry.

Sadness and anger won’t stop more of our neighbours from dying.

I am here today to tell you what we are doing and what more we plan to do.

Community Supports, Decriminalization, Safe Supply, and Complex Care treatment.

Let me start with Community supports

• City Council allocated new money in the 2021 budget to fund Vancouver Fire Rescue Services Combined Overdose Response Team in partnership with VCH
• We’ve provided a City-owned space for an Overdose Prevention Site (OPS) in the Downtown South neighbourhood to reduce the risk of people using alone.
• We’ve put Medic 11 into service in late 2020, strengthening our ability to provide vital services to vulnerable citizens in the Downtown East Side and Strathcona Park.
• We’ve Supported Vancouver Coastal Health’s mobile overdose prevention van to provide these services across the city
• And we’ve installed three temporary washroom trailers to support hygiene services for those who are at high risk of overdose, sexual, and physical violence — monitored by peers from WISH, RainCity Housing and the Overdose Prevention Society.

We also continue to co-chair, along with VCH, the Vancouver Community Action Team (CAT), representing approximately 25 organizations and people who use drugs who are working to tackle, or are affected by, the crisis.

The CAT has been instrumental in guiding our response and I want to thank them specifically for all their work and leadership. I will be meeting with them later today and I look forward to hearing from them and continuing our strong partnership.

A lot of work has been done, but we need to do more.

So let me talk about that, and I’ll start with decriminalization:

Decriminalization

On November 23rd of last year, Council unanimously backed my plan to formally request the federal government decriminalize simple possession of all illicit drugs in Vancouver.

We sent a letter to Canada’s Health Minister, Dr. Patty Hajdu to that effect on December 7th, and we received a positive response from Minister Hajdu on January 25th inviting us to proceed with our application. And we have.

I am pleased to announce that we are already well into the process with Heath Canada officials and in order to help our application proceed as quickly as possible, my office has retained the assistance and expertise of Dr. Kora DeBeck, Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and a Research Scientist with the BC Centre on Substance Use at Providence Health Care.

Dr. DeBeck has authored more than 130 articles in various areas of addiction research and specializes in the evaluation of health and policy interventions to reduce harms among people who use drugs.

Dr. DeBeck will work over the next few weeks to expedite our application with the goal of making sure City of Vancouver staff can hit the ground running and take over this process once they have their resources in place to work alongside our application partner Vancouver Coastal Health.

We anticipate sending the first of our phased submissions to Health Canada by March 1st.

In addition to our partner, we plan on working closely with the Vancouver Police Department who has been supportive of this work from day one, as well as community members, agencies, and people with lived experience.

Safe Supply

The other side of the coin when it comes to fighting the overdose crisis is safe supply.

When COVID-19 hit and it became clear how this health crisis was exasperating overdoses, I worked with VCH and other community members to sound the alarm.

I was incredibly heartened when the Federal Government created the space for safe supply with their health exemption, and I applaud the Province of B.C. for working to expand the number of prescribers that are working to connect people with life-saving safe-supply.

But it’s clear that there are major gaps yet to fill, and too many of our neighbours who need safe supply aren’t getting it.

That’s why we are working to expedite the processes around safe supply centres, including one being championed by our partners at Vancouver Coastal Health.

For those who are unfamiliar with this concept, Safe Supply is substituting illegal, poisoned drugs with pharmaceutical alternatives prescribed by health care professionals.

Simply put, when people living with addiction have access to drugs that don’t kill them, fewer people will die.

And when people don’t need to resort to desperation to find drugs on the street, we also reduce crime and help fight back against the illicit drug trade — stabilizing lives for so many people and for communities as a whole.

And finally, when people who use drugs have regular access to health care, they finally have a pathway to other services to improve their overall and wellbeing.

In the coming weeks I will be speaking with my colleagues in Victoria as well as health care professionals about how we can accelerate the roll-out of safe supply, increase the number of people who can prescribe it, and also grow the number of options safe supply applies to.

We need to get to a place where anyone who uses drugs can access them like any one of us would access life-saving medication — because that’s what this is.

The quicker we can do that, the faster we can stabilize lives and move down the spectrum towards treatment and recovery.

Complex Care

And this is the final piece I want to talk about today.

While saving lives and ending the poison street drug trade need to be our top priorities, we need to make sure we are looking after people with complex care and providing safe housing and wrap around services — especially for people living with brain injury caused by being revived from multiple overdoses — that allow people to stabilize and rebuild their lives.

That’s why I’m proud to be working alongside my fellow big city BC Mayors through the BC Urban Mayor’s Caucus on our “Blueprint for British Columbia’s Urban Future”.

One of the four main goals is to scale up investment for Mental health, substance use and addictions, including the kinds of complex care facilities we need.

We have met with the Provincial Government, specifically Attorney General David Eby and Minster Malcolmson , and I know they share our conviction that complex care needs to be front and center if we are to have a real shot at dealing with this tragic crisis.

And I’ll have more to announce on this soon.

Before I take your questions, let me close by saying again that the death of 408 of our neighbours in 2020 alone in our city is beyond tragic.

It’s another wake up call, in a long line of wake up calls.

Community supports, Decriminalization, Safe Supply, and Complex Care treatment.

That’s what we’re working on, and that’s what I’ll keep fighting for.

Thank you.