Pledges from both the B.C. NDP and Conservative Party of B.C. to expand the use of forced treatment for people with addictions or severe mental health issues is being met with pushback from some residents of B.C. — as well as Canada’s federal addictions minister.
On Friday, people living in Prince George — one of the cities hardest-hit by the illicit drug overdose crisis — held a rally on the steps of the Prince George courthouse, urging political leaders to work first on expanding options for voluntary treatment across B.C. rather than focusing on compulsory care.
“We need free treatment beds. We need rapid access to detox and no wait list,” said one of the rally’s organizers, Corrine Woods.
A member of Moms Stop the Harm, she said she lost her own son to an overdose in 2018 and knew first-hand the difficulty of accessing care.
“We have thousands of kids who would voluntarily like to try a road to recovery that is a treatment plan,” she said.
That same message was echoed by Ya’ara Saks, the federal minister for addictions, as she held a news conference in Ottawa to announce the first call for proposals from municipalities and Indigenous communities to access a share of a $150 million emergency treatment fund to respond to Canada’s overdose crisis.
Saks said she hasn’t seen the provinces move enough to scale up treatment “to meet the moment.”
Before having discussions about compulsory care, she said, provinces need to ensure adequate treatment services are in place for those seeking voluntary care.
“I would encourage B.C. or any other jurisdiction to, first and foremost, before they contemplate whether it is voluntary or involuntary, that they need the actual treatment services in place — which currently they don’t have,” she said.
Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Ya’ara Saks says that before the federal government contemplates involuntary or voluntary treatment, she would like to see ‘provinces and territories ensuring that they actually have treatment access scaled to need.’ Reporters pressed Saks about whether she supports the use of involuntary drug addiction treatment.
Some parents endorse forced treatment
Not everyone feels the same way.
Among them are the parents of 13-year-old Brianna MacDonald of Abbotsford, B.C., who died of a suspected overdose after her parents tried, but were unable, to get her treatment.
Her mother, Sarah MacDonald, says she took Brianna to hospital when she had an overdose last February. Brianna was transferred to a Children’s Hospital for a couple of days, then to a hospital in Surrey, and was discharged after about a week and a half, MacDonald said.
“I begged them, and I cried, and said, ‘Can you please not let her go?'” MacDonald said. “She wasn’t ready to leave.”
The parents of a 13-year-old girl say B.C.’s plans to expand its proposed involuntary care program for apprehensions under the Mental Health Act to include severe addiction comes too late. Brianna MacDonald died of a suspected overdose last month in Abbotsford. As Yasmine Ghania reports, her parents say they tried to get treatment for their daughter but couldn’t.
Their story was shared with CBC News days after British Columbia, under the B.C. NDP government, announced it would expand involuntary care for people in mental health and addictions crisis and open secure facilities for people who have been detained because they’re a danger to themselves or others.
The party says the expansion would come with “stringent criteria to ensure it is only used when absolutely necessary.”
The Conservative Party in B.C. announced earlier this week its plan to tackle the toxic drug crisis, which includes enacting involuntary treatment legislation for people “who are unable to make life-saving decisions on their own.”
The B.C. Green Party, meanwhile, has echoed the call to expand voluntary care options prior to focusing on forced treatment.
That approach has the endorsement of B.C.’s former chief coroner, Lisa LaPointe, who, at a campaign event with the Greens, said the government should proceed cautiously.
“We need to be very careful before we jump off this involuntary care cliff as the answer to this very complex public health emergency. We know people die after treatment. We know that involuntary care has very little evidence to support its effectiveness. What would really help people is having access to the care they need much further upstream,” she said.
Calls for psychiatric care hospital in the north
In Prince George, that call is particularly acute because of the lack of treatment options in the city. As the largest city in northern B.C., it serves a health region of approximately 290,000 people.
Dr. Barb Kane, the head of the department of psychiatry at University Hospital Northern B.C., has been petitioning for a psychiatric hospital to be established in the north.
“People with severe mental illness, there really hasn’t been an adequate place to treat them,” she said.
“They’ve ended up on the street, a lot of them … and that impacts police, everyone.”
The proposal has the support of several Prince George city councillors, including Trudy Klassen, who attended Friday’s rally.
“The issue is that our hospital and our psychiatric team in our hospital doesn’t have a place to adequately care for people who need longer-term care,” she said.
“I think some people think that is advocating for an increase in voluntary care, forgetting that we don’t even have voluntary care.”
She’s hoping to work with the next provincial government — whoever it is — to see the call for increased care become a reality.
Addiction can be agonizing and, far too often, deadly. It can tear apart families and communities. So it’s not surprising that politicians are under pressure to do something about it. And increasingly, some provinces are calling for involuntary care: forcing some people into treatment and keeping them there until the program is finished. There are still lots of questions. Does it work? Will it reduce the number of people using dangerous drugs? And how will governments decide who should be sent to treatment, without their consent? Will that power be exercised fairly?
