Newly released statistics by the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC) shows that overdoses were the leading cause of deaths for those under 18 in the province last year.
According to government data, a vast majority of the deaths involved the deadly opioid fentanyl.
The BCCDC Mortality Context App lists “illicit drug toxicity” as the number one cause of deaths for those aged 10 to 18 in the year 2022.
In the past six years, 142 young people have died from suspected drug overdoses, the BC Coroners Service reports.
Of those, 62% of the deaths involved youth aged 17 to 18 years old.
Vancouver pediatrician and addictions specialist James Wang told the Vancouver Sun that there simply aren’t enough resources to deal with the issue of addiction in youth.
“There are not enough clinicians who specialize in youth substance use, so most of the care adolescents in B.C. are receiving comes from front-line workers, including ER doctors and nurses, and there hasn’t been much training,” said Wang.
“In most youth who use substances, there is often a co-occurring mental health issue or environmental stressor such as at home or at school among peers and possibly even a genetic predisposition that puts them at higher risk.”
British Columbia also has a shortage of youth treatment beds. Out of the province’s 3,237 public substance use treatment spots only 156 are intended for those under the age of 18.
The NDP government has since promised an additional 53 beds this year as part of its budget, as well as 175 additional youth addiction workers.
In March, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre pledged to launch a $44 billion lawsuit against big pharma companies involved in allegedly causing the opioid pandemic.
“Money recovered from this massive lawsuit will fund treatment and recovery programs for people struggling with addiction. We will make sure that all Canadians can access treatment and recovery programs,” said Poilievre.
A new poll shows that Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are gaining ground in the province of Quebec, where the party has failed to garner strong support in the past two federal elections.
A new poll from Pallas Data has the Conservatives polling at 25% in Quebec – just 3% behind the Liberals (28%) and 4% behind the Bloc Quebecois (29%.)
SCREENSHOT: Conservatives gaining support in Quebec. Pallas Data
By contrast, the Conservatives received 18.6% of the votes in Quebec in the 2021 federal election, and 16% of the votes in the 2019 federal election.
Nationally, the Pallas poll has the Conservatives at 39%, the Liberals at 30%, the NDP at 17%, the Bloc at 7%, the Greens at 5% and the PPC at 2%.
In addition to negative poll numbers for Prime Minsiter Justin Trudeau, the Pallas poll also casts a grim outlook on his popularity. Forty-seven percent of Canadians say they would be more likely to support the Liberals if Trudeau was not their leader.
SCREENSHOT: Almost half of Canadians say they would be more likely to vote Liberal if Trudeau was not leader. Pallas Data.
In Quebec, 44.8% said they would be more inclined to vote Liberal if Trudeau was not leader – with the latter being higher than in prairie provinces (44.6%) and the maritimes (41.4%)
Canadians aged 18-34 were the most likely to consider voting Liberal if they had a different leader (57.3%). Meanwhile, 52.3% of Canadians aged 35-49, 43.7% of those 50-64 and 33.7% of those 65+ said they were more likely to vote for the Liberal party if it were not led by Trudeau.
Trudeau was asked this week if he had considered the possibility that he had become a liability for the Liberals.
During a press conference in P.E.I today, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about "F*CK TRUDEAU" merchandise and whether he has become a political "liability."
Trudeau responded there has been an increase in "frustration" and "mental health pressures" across the country.… pic.twitter.com/kMjLzbmlSG
He responded by discussing polarization, and said “I’m going to continue working hard every day to build that future that we all know Canada can have.”
Last year, Quebec bore witness to the rise of a grassroots conservative movement, with the Conservative Party of Quebec and its leader Eric Duhaime making historic gains in the provincial election.
The provincial Conservatives went from receiving 1.46% in 2018 to 12.92% in 2022. The party, however, did not win any seats.
While the provincial Conservatives rise in support was attributed to many centre-right Quebecers being frustrated with Premier Francois Legault’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, the party has maintained popularity even with the pandemic being over.
Polling averages on QC125 give the provincial Conservatives 9% support, hinting that it has maintained a base.
The Conservative Party of Canada will be holding its national convention in Quebec City in September. True North will be in attendance.
The Pallas Data survey was conducted between August 16 and 17, with a sample of 1021 Canadian adults. The poll’s margin of error for the poll is +/- 3.1%.
Former Liberal environment minister Catherine McKenna has accused the Conservatives and those who oppose carbon taxes of being “arsonists” as wildfires sweep across the Northwest Territories and British Columbia. Current Liberal ministers have criticized the Conservatives for wanting to “making pollution free.” If carbon taxes are the answer to forest fires, why did these fires happen in the first place, True North’s Andrew Lawton asks.
Also, Alberta Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz joins the show to talk about how Alberta is pushing back against Justin Trudeau’s electricity regulations.
Plus, Dr. Matt Strauss is suing Queen’s University for forcing him out of his job because of his opposition to lockdowns and vaccine mandates. He joins Andrew to discuss free speech in medicine and academic freedom.
Liberal Housing Minister Sean Fraser said that Ottawa isn’t ruling out capping foreign student visas as the country struggles to contain an affordability and housing crisis while also letting in a record number of international students.
According to Bloomberg, Fraser, who formerly held the immigration file prior to the latest cabinet shuffle, said that a cap on international students was “one of the options” worth considering to deal with Canada’s housing woes.
“I think that’s one of the options that we ought to consider,” Fraser said on Monday.
“But I think we should start by trying to partner with institutions to understand what role they may play to reduce the pressure on the communities that they’re operating within.”
Fraser’s comments seem to contradict his own statements in July after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest cabinet shuffle.
At the time, Fraser said that closing the door to newcomers was not the solution to address Canada’s housing situation.
“I would urge caution to anyone who believes the answer to our housing challenges is to close the door on newcomers,” said Fraser.
“When I talked to developers, in my capacity as a minister of immigration before today, one of the chief obstacles to completing the projects that they want to get done is having access to the labour force to build the houses that they need.”
Canada has no cap on the number of foreign student visas it approves each year.
Last year, while Fraser was still the minister of immigration, there were 807,750 foreign students with active permits in Canada – a 31% growth when compared to the 617,000 approved the year prior.
It is unclear whether current Immigration Minister Marc Miller would entertain a student visa cap.
Miller told reporters earlier this month that lowering Canada’s record immigration targets was out of the question and that he might even increase the rate above the current 500,000 per year target for permanent residents.
“I don’t see a world in which we lower it, the need is too great,” said Miller.
“Whether we revise them upwards or not is something that I have to look at. But certainly I don’t think we’re in any position of wanting to lower them by any stretch of the imagination.”
Federal immigration targets do not include the number of foreign student visas signed each year.
A new tax index by the Fraser Institute found that tax bills were the fastest growing expenditures for Canadians in the last few decades, even surpassing the rising cost of housing.
According to the Canadian Consumer Tax Index 2023 edition, taxes grew by 2,778% since 1961.
The rising cost of taxes surpassed other expenditures including money spent on shelter which grew by 1,880% over the same time period.
Canadians have been paying 870% more on food and 654% more on clothing since 1961.
According to the Fraser Institute, the average Canadian family paid more on taxes (45.3%) when compared to necessities of life like clothing, food and housing (35.6%).
“Taxes remain the largest household expense for families in Canada,” said the Fraser Institute’s Director of Fiscal Studies Jake Fuss.
“Considering the sheer amount of income that goes towards taxes in this country, Canadians may question whether or not we’re getting good value for our money.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has recently faced calls to lower taxes and introduce cheaper financing options to help build more homes as Canada faces a housing crisis.
Earlier this month, the National Housing Accord demanded that the Liberal government pursue an “industrial strategy” to tackle the issue.
“Millions of people — particularly those with the lowest incomes — are facing rapidly rising housing costs, driven significantly by an extreme lack of supply of the right types of rental housing,” reads the accord.
One of the proposed solutions was for Canada to lower taxes by amending the tax code, which would make it easier to build rental housing, according to the accord.
Additionally, the accord calls on the government to eliminate sales taxes on capital investments in housing projects like apartment buildings.
In the last year alone, the Trudeau government has hiked taxes on Canadians a number of times.
The Liberals have increased the federal carbon tax, imposed a second carbon tax on fuel and hiked taxes on alcohol. Additionally, taxes on employment insurance were also increased, as well as further taxes on the Canada Pension Plan.
Our prime minister, presently on a P.E.I. retreat with his cabinet, held a press conference on Monday in which he said the topic du jour would be the national housing dilemma.
Then, he rattled off all the things the Liberals had supposedly done since their 2015 election to ease the path towards home ownership and housing in general.
All fell flat.
The average Canadian, with home ownership out of reach and suitable rentals becoming equally unaffordable, was dumbstruck by Trudeau’s ability to find some optimism in the pool of negativity.
But the public was then provided a subject to throw them down a different path.
He talked about his blown marriage.
A reporter from the CBC asks Prime Minister Justin Trudeau how he’s feeling following his separation with his wife, Sophie Gregoire. pic.twitter.com/HoSkVzyvjD
“I really, really want to thank Canadians for having been so incredibly gracious and incredibly generous in respecting our privacy and our space,” Trudeau said during the media availability in P.E.I. It was his first public statement on the separation since it was announced.
“I got a really good 10 days with the family to focus on the kids, to focus on being together and moving forward.”
Trudeau and Sophie Grégoire announced their separation in statements posted to social media on August 2. They have been married for 18 years, and have three children: two sons, Xavier, 15, and Hadrien, 9, and one daughter, 14-year-old Ella-Grace.
“I want to thank all the people who’ve reached out over the past number of weeks with warm wishes, with personal messages, with personal stories that have been just wonderful and positive,” Trudeau added.
Housing? On a later day perhaps, because it was already proclaimed the retreat’s raison d’etre.
Until then? Cue the maudlin.
In the meantime, Trudeau is set to huddle with his new cabinet on how to address the soaring cost of living, and a growing vulnerability for his government as more Canadians blame it for their rising bills.
After all, there is an election at stake, and no one in the Liberal Party is rolling in accolades.
Pressure is mounting, according to a Nanos Research poll for Bloomberg News. Three in 10 Canadians blame government spending over other factors for the rise in consumer prices. Another 22% blame businesses for increasing their prices, while 10% point the finger at the Bank of Canada, which has raised interest rates 20 consecutive times to a 20-year-high of 5%.
“For the average person, it is like an inflationary spiral one cannot escape,” pollster Nik Nanos said by email. “Government spending increases inflation, the Bank of Canada increases rates and businesses then increase prices to cover rising inputs into goods and services.”
While headline inflation was 3.3% in July, food prices were up 7.8% and the central bank’s aggressive hikes mean mortgage interest costs have spiked 30.6%. Record levels of immigration have exacerbated a housing supply shortage, helping boost the benchmark home price to $754,800.
Meanwhile, federal spending is still above pre-pandemic levels, with the government projecting a $40.1-billion deficit this year.
Trudeau, in the leadup to his cabinet retreat, has begun to send a message of belt-tightening. Treasury Board President Anita Anand, the former defence minister, recently sent a letter to cabinet colleagues giving them an October deadline to find areas to cut $14.1 billion in spending by 2028 and $4.1 billion in the years that follow.
So, every cabinet minister will have to make out a list.
It’s a list that should be made public — hopefully without any cuts to housing or the accompanying infrastructure.
A local state of emergency has been declared by the St. Mary’s First Nation in New Brunswick due to an ongoing drug crisis in the community.
In a statement posted on Facebook, the St. Mary’s First Nation states that the community is in danger, in particular its youth, due to a spike in illegal drug-related activity.
The First Nation community said the next 48 hours are critical following the emergency declaration, which is effective immediately. They are also asking for the full cooperating of the community during this time.
The post was signed by the chief and council and said that “escalating risks due to illegal drug activity which endangers the safety and wellbeing of our citizens, particularly our youth.”
More details are to come as the community creates a plan to deal with the issues alongside help from federal and provincial partners.
The post has also asked that members of the community not congregate around the police presence during their activity for safety reasons.
Fredericton police have not yet commented on what has caused the state of emergency however, they have increased their presence in the community along with RCMP, Fredericton Fire and EMS.
Fredericton police responded to a disturbance on Sunday, in which one male was charged with assault with a weapon and taken into custody.
“Upon arrival, members observed a large crowd gathered in an area that required immediate containment,” said Fredericton police in a statement to CBC.
The St. Mary’s community said that the state of emergency was declared in order to “access additional resources through provincial and federal programs.”
“The battle against drugs is one which demands unity and a collective commitment to safety,” said the community safety update. “We cannot afford to be complacent or indifferent in the face of this threat.”
Fredericton Mayor Kate Rogers said she was notified of the local state of emergency on Monday night.
“I have faith in the police force and I have faith that we’ll be notified when we need to take further measures,” said Rogers.
“I have respect for Chief [Polchies Jr.] and band council that they’re making the decisions that they feel they need to for their community.”
Former Liberal environment minister Catherine McKenna had harsh words for Conservatives who oppose carbon taxes. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), McKenna called them “arsonists” responsible for the growing number of wildfires across Canada.
Plus, no human remains were found in the excavation of a church basement in Pine Creek, Manitoba, which was formerly part of a residential school run by the Catholic Church from 1890 to 1969.
And a women’s rights advocate is urging Conservatives to protect women’s spaces and categories at the upcoming Conservative Party convention.
Tune into The Daily Brief with Cosmin Dzsurdzsa and Andrew Lawton!
Canada’s elections watchdog cited and fined a former adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) for violating an election law in 2021.
On Monday, Ayesha Chughta was accused of voting in a riding that she was not eligible to vote in, according to a notice posted on the Commissioner of Canada Elections’ website.
Chughtai attempted to vote in the Calgary Skyview riding on Sept. 2, 2021 despite the fact that she’d already been told she was not eligible to do so. Chughtai claimed that there was a rule in the Canada Elections Act which permitted people to vote in their previous riding as long as they had lived there within six months before moving, however the Canada Elections Act does not permit this.
The former adviser was denied eligibility but then decided to vote in an advance poll in the Calgary Skyview riding on Sept. 13, according to the commissioner’s office.
George Chahal was the Liberal candidate for Calgary Skyview during the 2021 election that Chughtai illegally voted for and he won the seat. Chahal himself has also been charged by the commissioner’s office for removing his opponent’s flyers from doorsteps in that area. He was charged $500 for his conduct.
“The failure of those involved in the political process to comply with the rules adopted by Parliament to ensure a fair election can contribute to a loss of public confidence in the integrity of members of the political class, which may, as a result, increase voter apathy,” said the Commissioner of Canada Elections in the notice.
The notice of violation did not specify how Chughtai managed to still vote in the advanced poll after being denied previously but it did confirm that she has received a fine of $1,500 dollars for her conduct. That is $500 dollars higher than what the baseline violation fine normally would be but the Commissioner of Canada Elections said the additional $500 was necessary in Chughtai’s case, citing two factors.
The first being that she’d already been told she couldn’t vote in Calgary Skyview and the second was her motive for wanting to vote in that riding.
Chughtai “indicated to returning office staff that she intended to vote in the electoral district of Calgary Skyview in order to support the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) candidate running in that electoral district.”
“Information on file shows that Ayesha Chughtai was working for the LPC during the 44th general election — including as a volunteer for the LPC candidate for whom she indicated she wished to vote — and that she was then also an employee of the Prime Minister’s Office,” said commissioner’s office.
In 2017, Chughtai started working on Parliament Hill and eventually began working as a PMO advisor for the Prairies and the North in March of 2021. She announced that she would be leaving the position in June 2022 to take a job with Deloitte, a consulting firm.
“I continue to this day to own my home in the riding and I incorrectly believed that I was eligible to continue to vote in that riding,” wrote Chughtai in a Facebook post. “I regret the circumstances and have cooperated with Elections Canada throughout the process. I have not worked for the government for more than a year.”
Michael Barrett, the Conservative ethics critic spoke with the Toronto Star following the incident, saying that this sort of behaviour is indicative of Prime Minister Trudeau’s leadership style.
“It’s no surprise members of the prime minister’s staff followed his disregard for democratic institutions and broke election law by knowingly casting an illegal vote for a Liberal candidate,” said Barrett.
“Today marks the conclusion of our initial excavation,” words spoken on August 18 by Derek Nepinak, Chief of the remote Pine Creek Indian Reserve 440 km northwest of Winnipeg, Manitoba.
This suggests that further excavations looking for the remains of unnamed indigenous children no reserve members are frantically looking for will continue, at least if extravagant and wasteful public funding for such searches continues.
As of the end of September 2022, the federal government had allocated $90 million to aboriginal communities and organizations to help identify unmarked burials tied to former residential school sites where unspeakable horrors are said to have been meted out on their students.
The total amount of federal funds earmarked for research, commemoration, and field-investigation work is $320 million, so the Pine Cree Reserve still has a large cash reservoir to draw from.
The Pine Creek Indian Residential School, one of Canada’s longest-running boarding schools for treaty aboriginals (1890-1969), was operated by the Roman Catholic Church on behalf of the Government of Canada.
As with many of these schools, homesickness and an aversion to alien forms of discipline and regimentation led students to run away or engage in acts of arson. In 1928, a group of eight boys ran away from the school. Two years later, a boy was caught trying to set the school on fire.
Allegedly, “some of the living students have long spoken about the abuse there.” However, neither the nature of the abuse nor its perpetrators nor its victims have ever been identified except in the vaguest possible terms.
According to the Reserve’s July 18, 2023 “statement on excavation plan of unmarked burials at [the] former residential school site and Catholic Church”:
“Community members have been in planning since last fall to excavate the basement locations since the discovery [using ground penetrating radar] of 14 possible unmarked burials under the Church and 57 other suspected locations on the grounds around the church and old school site. We understand that over time burial sites may be lost to the natural elements but to bury remains under a building suggests a dark and sinister intent that cannot be unaddressed as we expose the truth of what happened in our homeland.”
The statement also revealed that the search was grounded in the 2021 alleged discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the former Indian Residential School in Kamloops, BC. Moreover, the Pine Creek copy-cat search included “reaching out to potential partners in exposing the truth, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Archdiocese of the Catholic Church in Winnipeg, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, Brandon University, The federal Special Interlocutor’s Office for Missing Children and the International Commission on Missing Persons.”
To its credit, and unlike any other such search for the remains of students associated with the former boarding schools, the RCMP was called in last October to assist with the investigation.
Given all the accusations of school abuse, some passed down from generation to generation, band leaders, elders, knowledge keepers, and former boarding school students must have been devasted by the RCMP announcement on July 21 that:
“The investigation into possible criminality in relation to potential burials at Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Roman Catholic Church has moved into a new phase. After a year of interviewing community members, conducting surveys, and following up on leads, the RCMP has not uncovered evidence at this time related to criminal activity specific to the reflections detected at the site.”
“In consultation with the community and partners, a way forward has been found. A community-led forensic anthropological dig in the basement of the church is taking place. If anything is located that is possibly related to criminal activity, the RCMP has plans in place and investigators assigned to continue the investigation.”
And so the investigation continued to excavate, “the next step on a journey of trauma and healing,” likely exacerbated by the RCMP announcement, as members of the community were told at a research update on July 25, the day before the basement of the Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Church that sits beside the former Pine Creek Residential School was dug up.
The charming Our Lady of Seven Sorrows probably was designed by one of the Oblate Fathers, Reverend St. Germain. In 1930, fire destroyed its interior, but the congregation rebuilt it. In 1991, the church became a provincially-designated historic site.
Nearly four weeks later, in an August 18 Facebook video, a despondent Chief Nepinak revealed the excavation’s results. Although “difficult truths” about “horrible things” at the school had been revealed by former students, presumably including the murder of indigenous children by clergy and staff, no evidence of human remains was found.
In retrospect, the only organization not contacted to help with the investigation was the most important one of all, namely the Government of Manitoba Vital Statistics Branch.
Why an allegedly sovereign “First Nation” hired a pricey ground penetrating radar (GPR) outfit with public monies to do a crude surface investigation before searching for the death records and death certificates of any alleged missing reserve children who had attended the local boarding school is troubling.
If truth-telling were really the goal of this investigation, community leaders and their consultants would have started by digging into the archives at little expense to determine the fate of the 21 “missing” children on the Pine Creek section of National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation’s Memorial Register, a list compiled “to forever remember and honour the children who never returned home from residential schools.”
Had it done so, it would have found that of these students, 15 have been found by an independent researcher, only one of whom was listed as having died at the Pine Creek Indian Residential School.
This finding goes to the heart of the uncertainty surrounding both the thousands of missing children listed on the Memorial Register and those claimed, as in the case of Pine Creek, to be buried in unmarked graves near the residential schools.
These very different issues have been deliberately or negligently conflated: the hundreds of alleged but unproven burial plots “discovered” in mainly named reserve cemeteries by the error-prone technique called GPR have found not a single missing Indian Residential School student.
On the other hand, of the 4,115 students listed in Memorial Register, nearly all have a name and date of death attached to them. Invariably, these former students are also referred to as “missing.” But they are not missing because they are known to be dead. Their cause of death, place of death, and place of burial is slowly being revealed by impartial researchers.
The sole purpose of this conflation is to imply that many or most named Memorial Register children are lying in the newly discovered GPR soil disturbances and thousands more that are still to be found.
As for Pine Creek, with no accountability required and $320 million of federal funds to draw on, Chief Nepinak was justified in opening the excavation of the church basement represents no conclusion for his reserve: “This does not mark the end of our truth-finding project.”
What now needs to be joyfully shouted from the rooftops are both the unique police investigation and the ground-breaking discovery of no human remains under the Pine Creek Catholic church, hopefully marking the beginning of a truth-finding effort rooted in Western science, objectivity, and critical thinking rather than fanciful indigenous horror stories.
Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report and a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba
