When Stephen Harper launched his high-profile National Anti-Drug Strategy in the fall of 2007, he took aim at critics who were already saying his new Conservative government was putting too much emphasis on more drug arrests and longer prison sentences, and not enough on helping addicts. “This approach will be tough on crime and compassionate for victims,” the Prime Minister said in a speech in Winnipeg announcing the policy. “If you’re addicted to drugs, we’ll help you, but if you deal drugs, we’ll punish you.”
The blueprint Harper unveiled that day would bring more than $500 million in spending by a dozen federal departments and agencies under one umbrella. Spending was mapped out for five years, the period that ended this past spring. Now, a plan for the next five years of anti-drug programs, again worth more than half a billion dollars, has been drafted. Despite Harper’s early emphasis on balance, though, the planning and priorities report tabled with the federal Treasury Board for the next five years reveals deep cuts in Health Canada’s budget for drug treatment—but hefty increases in budgets for drug enforcement by police and prosecutors.
The spending squeeze that’s likely to be most demoralizing for groups running street-level rehabilitation programs for addicts is the reduction of Health Canada’s Drug Treatment Funding Program to $80 million for the next five years, down from $122 million in the previous five years. In sharp contrast, the RCMP will see its five-year funding for investigating marijuana growers and clandestine drug labs rise to $113 million, up from $85 million in the previous five years. As well, support for the federal Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions will rise to $61 million for the coming five-year stretch, up from $43 million for the strategy’s first half-decade.
The government has done nothing to publicize the anti-drug policy’s second five-year phase, much less drawn attention to the apparent shift in funding priorities. Maclean’s asked Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq’s office why treatment funding was being cut. Her officials said some of the earlier funding was meant “to support the provinces and territories in establishing treatment centres or programs,” not to pay for their ongoing operations. That answer will hardly satisfy groups trying to maintain street-level treatment services. “So you now have programs that have proven their efficacy, but there are no resources to sustain them,” said Susan Shepherd, manager of the Toronto Drug Strategy Secretariat. “They’re done.”
In some cases, those resources apparently dried up months ago. Bernadette MacDonald, executive director of Tri-County Women’s Centre, a Nova Scotia group working on rural anti-drug projects whose more than $300,000 in federal funding runs out this year, said the Health Canada office in Halifax that managed those grants was shut down last spring. “Having regional staff,” she said, “was very important for community organizations.” MacDonald added that she isn’t aware of any new money from Ottawa for the sort of drug-awareness work her group has been doing with teenagers.
Health care funding is being cut to the bone, jobs in the health care system are being cut like never before and the waiting lists to see specialists or even GP's is getting worse and worse. The wait list to get a family doctor in some parts of the country is a year. Yes that is right it can take up to a FULL FUCKING YEAR just to see a GP that does not operate out of a walk in clinic depending on where you live in the country. Even where i live where up until recently there was no trouble finding doctors or atleast GP's we are starting to see ridiculous wait times to get a family doctor now. They have no trouble funding the red coats to administer their authoritarian laws but when it comes to health care or any kind of social safety nets (their new EI policy would be a good example) you couldn't pull a 5 dollar bill out of their arse with a tow truck.