As the fentanyl crisis continues in B.C., the issue of what to do about the growing number of deaths connected to the drug has become a political football.
Especially in the Lower Mainland, it’s a scary and emotional issue with the public. So predictably, the political manoeuvring on the issue wasn’t far behind.
This week, the City of Vancouver mulled raising property taxes an additional 0.5 per cent to help add resources to deal with the crisis. But others, including the province’s NDP, wondered why homeowners were being asked to pony up to deal with what is essentially a health crisis in the province.
When questioned, Premier Christy Clark lectured that, “we all have to do our part.”
Well, yes and no.
As the urban centre in the eye of the storm on fentanyl, Vancouver has the unenviable task of witnessing the crisis unfold on its streets. Front-line emergency responders like police and firefighters there have been forced into dealing with that.
But it doesn’t change the fact that a health-care crisis is a provincial responsibility. The premier’s response signals an attitude that’s hardly new in British Columbia. Downloading from senior governments to the local level for any number of social issues has been a decade-long pattern. But that doesn’t make it right. Adequate money from the province to fund ambulance time, nursing staff and addiction services is what’s needed to deal with the crisis.
The federal government doesn’t get a free pass, either. They’ve been sitting on applications to set up additional sanctioned supervised injection sites, known to help curb overdose deaths, but have yet to approve them. Then there’s the federal/provincial haggling over transfer payments to fund health care in general
Before more people die, it’s time for both senior levels of government to step up.
