As Canadians head to the polls in the coming days, they will be faced with few options to increase access to harm reduction while thousands of people continue to die each year from the adulterated drug supply.
Instead, platforms released by the major parties ahead of the April 28 election reflect a long-running retreat from lifesaving policies, in favor of “tough-on-crime” legislation.
There’s been a years-long political backlash against harm reduction in Canada, in what experts and people who use drugs have called a moral panic.
Of the four national parties’ platforms, only one is explicitly pro-harm reduction. The other three either ignore the toxic drug crisis, or talk of ramping up enforcement or outright attack harm reduction.
The Green Party is promising to expand harm reduction. The party’s platform includes increased funding for supervised consumption sites and other services, full decriminalization of drug possession for personal use, and establishing a federally managed safe supply program. The Greens are polling in the low single digits, however.
The Liberals and the Conservatives are pursuing a trend of prohibitionist entrenchment, focusing either on law enforcement or on dismantling harm reduction.
The center-left New Democratic Party (NDP), also polling below 10 percent, is promising to expand mental health coverage, to end homelessness and to improve health care—all issues firmly adjacent to drug use—but its platform makes no mention of non-prescription drugs, of overdose or even of addiction.
Meanwhile the Liberals and the Conservatives—the only parties with any chance of forming the next government, according to the polls—are pursuing a trend of prohibitionist entrenchment, focusing either on law enforcement or on dismantling harm reduction.
The Liberals are in the former category. The party has been in power for almost a decade, and had been facing a resounding defeat to the Conservatives until the Trump administration’s attacks on Canada changed the picture. It’s now favored to win.
Until recently, the Liberals were receptive to harm reduction measures—though were commonly criticized by experts for watering down policies to a point of irrelevance.
More recently, their retreat from harm reduction has accelerated. The Liberals’ current election platform focuses entirely on treatment and enforcement.
In the platform’s health care section, the single reference to the crisis is to add $500 million to the Emergency Treatment Fund to help communities “confront the toxic drug and overdose crisis and connect more people to treatment and vital services faster.”
The Liberals promise to increase Canada Border Services Agency funding; expand the Coast Guard’s mandate to include drug enforcement; and allow Canada Post to search for drugs in the mail.
The other mentions of drugs come in the platform’s national security and public safety sections.
The party is promising to increase Canada Border Services Agency funding to add 1,000 more officers and more equipment to search for drugs at the border; to expand the Coast Guard’s mandate to include drug trafficking enforcement; and to allow Canada Post to search for fentanyl and other contraband in the mail through a general warrant.
The Liberals also promise to “put those profiting from fentanyl behind bars by prosecuting more complex drug trafficking and organized crime offenses,” through further funding of the prosecution service.
The Conservatives place even heavier emphasis on enforcement.
That includes imposing a life sentence for people convicted of trafficking fentanyl “at a large scale.” The platform itself doesn’t define “large scale,” but the party has previously put it at a figure of just 40 milligrams.
The party’s “tough-on-crime” agenda includes laws that the Supreme Court of Canada has already found unconstitutional. Among them were mandatory minimum sentences and consecutive life sentences that would leave some people with no chance of parole ever, as well as “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” legislation, mirroring laws in the United States that have been correlated with increases in homicides.
This is despite mountains of evidence showing so-called tough-on-crime legislation does not reduce crime and can even increase crime rates.
The Conservatives have also committed to funding treatment for 50,000 people.
The Conservatives have promised to end safe supply, calling it a “failed … experiment that has flooded streets with taxpayer-funded addictive opioids, keeping people hooked instead of helping them heal.”
While the Liberals and NDP have remained tight-lipped about harm reduction, the Conservatives have been all too happy to keep it in the conversation.
The party has gone on the offensive against supervised consumption sites and overdose prevention sites, saying it would ban them within 500 meters of schools, parks and seniors homes, “and impose strict new oversight rules to ensure they are pathways for treatment and recovery.”
That follows an Ontario government law to ban the sites within 200 metres of a school or daycare. Opponents of that law obtained a temporary injunction against it, but most sites closed anyway due to concurrent funding constraints imposed by the province.
The Conservatives have also promised to end safe supply, calling it a “failed … experiment that has flooded streets with taxpayer-funded addictive opioids, keeping people hooked instead of helping them heal.”
Their planned national assault on harm reduction follows a years-long buildup of resentment against it on the right.
But it isn’t just the right wing that is participating in the dismantling of harm reduction. The NDP’s provincial counterpart in British Columbia, for instance, has long been acquiescing to the attacks—severely limiting access to safe supply, effectively ending the decriminalization pilot, and curbing programs to distribute naloxone and needles and pipes.
“I think it’s quite shocking that these politicians have stooped so low that they would be putting the broader society at risk of the rise in the spread of infectious diseases, worsening the burden on our health care system, just for a handful of political points,” Anmol Swaich, a community organizer with the Surrey Union of Drug Users in BC, told Filter last September.
And the federal Liberal Party has been at the BC NDP’s side, through both the rise of harm reduction policies and the subsequent retreat.
The Liberals allowed an expansion of safe supply programs, but in a highly restrictive manner, allowing only pilot programs with limited timelines in medicalized settings.
Similarly, the Liberal government allowed the BC decriminalization pilo—which was criticized long before it began, however, for setting unrealistic thresholds for personal possession.
Power will fall either to the Conservatives or to the Liberals, who have been cowed into mimicking conservative talking points and positions on drug use.
The 2025 election platforms seem to confirm that the war on Canada’s relatively progressive harm reduction provision—often spearheaded by provincial conservative parties—will continue to escalate at a federal level.
In a 2023 interview I conducted for The Maple, Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users member Garth Mullins, host of the Crackdown podcast, said that moral panic around supposed public disorder linked to drug use was able to take hold because people do genuinely feel unsafe.
However, he said concerns around safety were really more economic in nature—people being unable to afford housing and groceries, and facing troubles with debt and stagnant wage increases.
“Those feelings are all around us, and I think they make everybody feel insecure and unsafe,” he said. “And so the right puts their finger on something — you feel scared, you are worried — but then they pivot and they say, ‘Well, what you should be worried about is there’s people roaming around with no house, who are mentally ill drug users.’”
The solutions proposed, then, are more cops and less funding for programs that, as the right puts it, “coddle” drug users, Mullins said. “So they’re playing politics, and then the BC NDP is playing it right back.”
After the election, power will fall either to the Conservatives or to the Liberals, who have similarly been cowed into mimicking conservative talking points and positions on drug use. The right’s strategy, at least for the time being, will have won.
Photograph (cropped) by Dennis Sylvester Hurd via Flickr/Public Domain
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