B.C. Green Party leader Sonia Furstenau, listens to questions from Union of BC Municipalities members during a convention in Vancouver on Friday, September 20, 2024. Former British Columbia chief coroner Lisa Lapointe is slated to appear alongside BC Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau for a policy announcement related to the province's illicit-toxic drug crisis. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ethan Cairns
VICTORIA – Former British Columbia chief coroner Lisa Lapointe has emerged from retirement to throw her weight behind a BC Green’s campaign pledge to expand safer supply of opioids and other drugs to deal with the province’s deadly overdose crisis.
Greens Leader Sonia Furstenau says other party leaders have indulged in “dehumanizing rhetoric” against drug users that she says is unacceptable.
Furstenau says a broader system of prescribed safer supply of drugs, including fentanyl, is needed, as well as a “demedicalized model” to reduce stigma and barriers in the current system.
The Greens are also pledging an evidence-based standard for treatment and recovery, with Lapointe saying there’s a lack of evidence that compulsory drug treatment plans pushed by other parties will work.
Lapointe, who joined Fursteanu at a Victoria news conference, retired earlier this year after 13 years on the job and in the midst of the toxic drug crisis that has killed more than 15,000 people since a health emergency was declared in 2016.
Before her retirement, Lapointe lamented that the emergency never received a “a co-ordinated response commensurate with the size of (the) crisis.”
In her final months as chief coroner, a review panel recommended providing controlled drugs without prescriptions but the idea was almost immediately rejected by the provincial government.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, NDP Leader David Eby is in Terrace in B.C.’s northwest looking to win back the Skeena riding being vacated by Ellis Ross, who held the seat for BC United, but will now run in the federal election for the Conservatives.
The BC NDP announced it had nominated candidates in all 93 ridings for the Oct. 19 election. The party says the slate is 60 per cent women.
B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad was scheduled to spend the morning making an announcement in Kimberly, in the Kootenays, followed by a meet-and-greet 30 kilometres south in Cranbrook.
All three leaders are scheduled to debate each other two days before advance polling opens.
A consortium of broadcasters announced the Oct. 8 debate will air from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. on all major television and radio news networks and be moderated by Angus Reid Institute president Shachi Kurl.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 24, 2024.
