Adoption of Alberta addictions strategy shows it’s working, says minister

By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on October 3, 2024.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

Premiers of two different parties in two provinces on opposite sides of the country are looking at legislation that would provide involuntary care for people who are at risk of harming themselves or others because of addictions and other issues.
For Alberta’s Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Dan Williams, that shows other provinces are paying heed to Alberta’s strategy on addressing mental health and addictions issues.
The government is drafting legislation “for those who are in the most dire situation of addiction, who are a danger to themselves or others. Because of that we are offering an opportunity to intervene because the alternative isn’t a voluntary course of treatment, the alternative to that individual is an incredibly painful and nasty path towards self-harm or harm to community. I could not think of anything more uncompassionate” or more unCanadian than leaving people to deal with the carnage of addiction,” Williams said in a phone interview on Wednesday.
The province’s recovery model has critics in Alberta including NDP leader Naheed Nenshi who told The Herald during an interview here in August that “the UCP’s single-minded focus on abstinence-based recovery is not working. The so-called Alberta model has already failed. We’re losing more people to addiction and drug poisoning than we were before the UCP came in.”
But Williams says Canadians are waking up to the fact that compassionate care includes a recovery-based focus.
And the premiers of B.C. and New Brunswick may agree. In September, B.C.’s NDP premier David Eby committed to involuntary treatment and New Brunswick premier Blaine Higgs has promised to introduce an act that would allow the government to put people with severe addictions into treatment without their consent.
Williams said Wednesday that Alberta has put forward an alternative to the only policy study that Canada’s had for addictions treatment for the past 25 years.
“Canadians have effectively, I think, been lied to and it’s a failure,” said Williams of what he calls a “lot of woke academics and activists with extreme ideology, pushing the idea that people have to choose between being compassionate toward those suffering from addictions and having safe communities. That’s not the case.
“The Alberta model is proving that’s not the case. The Alberta model is proving that’s not the case.”
The fundamental assumption the UCP has adopted is that addiction will run its course in one of two ways, either ending in pain, misery and death or it will end in treatment, recovery and a second lease on life.
“So when you see jurisdictions like the B.C. NDP adopting the same policy as United Conservatives in Alberta and New Brunswick on the East Coast adopting the same policy” of compassionate intervention and potentially mandatory treatment for “those who are a danger to themselves or others due to their substance use or addiction then you know that the tides are turning,” Williams said.
“We know that Canadians are fed up with the idea that we have to have disorder, chaos and carnage in our communities in order to be compassionate. We know blatantly, demonstrably that’s not true.”
Being compassionate and Canadian means caring for people with addictions, said the minister. Especially when they’re so vulnerable because of their addictions they’re overdosing multiple times a week, said Williams.
All political parties are coming to the realization that if they listen to the interests of their communities, they don’t want disorder in downtown cores, shopping malls, recreation centres and elsewhere, he added.
“They want to see their communities return to the way they were when they were growing up. They don’t want to be uncompassionate either, which is why you need to build out an alternative to addictions facilitation in the addictions treatment policy. It needs to be health care that actually delivers health outcomes. I want people to get healthy again,” he said, adding that he wants people suffering from addictions to get access to the health care system and leave renewed again.
“Not this sort of indefinite addiction that is facilitated” by unsafe supply and drug consumption sites “on every street corner. That path isn’t working, it’s obvious and that’s why we see the NDP in B.C. and others turning to the Alberta model,” he added.
That approach was tried and “it turns out that the academic world lied to us that this was the only path forward and they also said it would work and it hasn’t.”
He said it was a mistake for Ottawa and activists in the harm reduction world to think that Canadians will continue to believe harm reduction will work when they see crime and violence worsening in their communities.
“This is not a dignified way to treat people in addiction and it’s certainly not making communities healthier.”
Williams said there were good intentions when harm reduction began “but when you become the drug dealer – and it does not matter whether you’re a drug cartel or Justin Trudeau – if you’re handing out high-powered pharmaceutical grade opioids en masse, the effect on the community is the same and it stops being harm reduction and it becomes harm production. And fundamentally, Alberta is against causing harm in our communities. That’s why this government has opposed an ideology,” said Williams and instead introduced what he calls a common sense approach in giving people health care and an opportunity to recover.
In May of 2023, year over year the province saw a 55 per cent decrease in opioid overdose deaths,” he said.
“We’re starting to see progress and I’m cautiously optimistic it will continue,” said the Minister, noting the province has opened up more than 10,000 addictions treatment space since the Alberta model was started in 2019 and they are full.
The province has also “massively” increased detox beds across the province” and reduced the $1,240 a month fee that you had to pay for addictions treatment under the NDP and now make it zero barrier to get in,” he said.
The province offers “premier world-class addiction treatment therapeutic communities in our recovery centres that would normally be tens of thousands of dollars a month at zero cost to someone entering that,” he said. Recovery programs are also being introduced to prisons and correctional facilities in Alberta.
“We’re seeing more and more lives saved because of addictions treatment and we’re seeing better and better outcomes,” added the minister.
The province is dropping all barriers to recovery and giving people “an offramp off of addiction into recovery because if they keep barrelling down that highway of addiction, it runs into a brick wall and I don’t want to see that carnage continuing in our communities,” he added.

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