The Ben Mulroney Show - Should we be sending addicts to treatment against their will? Ben speaks with the Alberta Minister of Health about his plan

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Alberta plans to impose mandatory addictions treatment with Guest: Dan Williams, Minister of Mental Health and Addiction of Alberta If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you have listened to this show in the past, then you know that issues like addiction, mental health, the fentanyl crisis, opioids, safe supply, the BC model, safe injection sites, these are things we routinely talk about on this show. I feel that there have been some short-sighted bad moves by people who are governed not by fact or data, but by ideology. I was an original proponent of the BC model because it was going to be based on the Portuguese model and for those of you who don't know, Portugal decriminalized all drugs in their country but in doing so they created an alternate path of justice so that if somebody was caught with drugs they would be diverted not into the criminal justice system but into a parallel system that allowed them to have a clean record and also go into treatment and so the money that was saved in

criminal justice was diverted into this new program. I was quite bullish that BC would get it right. Just do what the Portuguese did. They did no such thing. And they created the chaos that we have seen in British Columbia. Enter Alberta with the Alberta model and Alberta has plans to impose mandatory addiction treatment on people suffering from drug addiction. And here to talk about this is the person in charge of this plan, Dan Williams, the Minister of Mental Health and Addiction of Alberta. Minister, thank you so much for joining us on the Ben Mulroney Show. Ben, thanks for having me. So this is, so explain to me the genesis of the Alberta model. Is it in reaction to the failures that you've seen elsewhere in the country?

Is it based on a best practice elsewhere in the world? Yeah, it is a reaction, I think, in many ways. Canadians have been gaslit for, I'd say, two and a half decades from so-called experts telling us what at first seemed reasonable, as you said, that we should reduce the harm to those in addiction. And there were maybe examples they alluded to, like Portugal, which you're very well formed on. I've spoken and visited Portugal to see the model, and it's exactly as you described.

Alberta's taken some lessons from there. But Alberta basically said, this isn't working. And it's not just that you can see that on the streets. We see it in our families, in our communities. And you can bring out as many community college professors as you want, trying to tell us that if you dump high-powered opioids onto my street, my community will be safer and we will reduce addiction. But that's not been the case. And a common sense approach would tell you that it was only going to get worse. The Alberta model, by contrast, doesn't assume that facilitating drug addiction is going

to help. We understand that it started off as harm reduction, but it's become harm production when you have unsafe supply and drug system, meeting them where they're at so we can get them options like opioid agonist therapy and the world's best and innovative program when it comes to immediate access, same day access to sublicates, aboxone, methadone, et cetera. But for a small group of Albertans, just like we have across the whole country, people that are so gripped by the addiction, they need an intervention. Just like if a family or a workplace or others weren't intervening,

but these folks don't have a workplace and their families have been frustrated or long gone because of the nature of the addiction. So it's left up to society to intervene. And so compassionate intervention says for that small group of people that are a danger to themselves or others, we had one individual overdose 186 times last year that we recorded likely more times than that then. And that for that individual and others like him or her, we need to intervene as a society and say that this is not a lifestyle choice and that this will lead given time, in one of two ways, either to an intervention of some kind, and recovery, and a new lease on life,

out of addiction, as a family member, as a brother and mother, or given enough time, it will lead to pain, and misery, and death. Well, you know, let me tell you, Minister, why I think everybody should give this model a chance to either succeed or fail on its own in good faith. I believe that you have a very good chance of succeeding.

I think the metrics will bear that out. But the reason I won't listen to ideologues who say, oh, people have to hit rock bottom before they have. Most people probably have to hit rock bottom, or some people have to hit rock bottom, but not all of them. Some of them need a chance. Some of them need to be told, in a pretty heavy-handed way, you can't live like this. If you continue to live like this, you will die. And if a project like this saves some of those people, or at least gives them a fighting chance to get off drugs, they might return to them, but in its own way,

this model is the definition of harm reduction because you are taking somebody and saying, you don't have the requisite ability to form a proper judgment here. So we are going to replace your judgment with ours. And in that way, they detox, at least temporarily. And in that way, that is in and of itself harm reduction. Yeah, I think that you're exactly right that given enough time that this is just going to

end to more chaos and disaster not just for that individual in addiction who has dignity and worth as a Canadian but also to the wider community. I mean we have individuals fencing with the wind with a used syringe out front of the community rectplex as family members, parents, mother with children are trying to get into their swimming lesson and somebody's speedballing methamphetamine and fentanyl and they're not in possession of their faculties the way you and I are. They're not choosing the way you and I are to have this conversation today, Ben. They're compelled by this. So if they're a danger to themselves or others, this program of compassion intervention I'm proposing is not for the kid in mom's basement that's

smoking too much pot. You know, cannabis can be dangerous for especially for youth. That is a fair consideration. I'm not talking about that. Yeah, I'm talking about that 186 overdose turning pro 187 and that person potentially dying. Yeah, not having to reverse. Now what happens minister, what happens minister when you ultimately face ideologues who pervert justice and say that you are infringing on the charter rights of Canadians and you, it is you who are actually not respecting their dignity of choice. Okay, it's not a choice.

This isn't a lifestyle choice. Walk down any street, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, or heck, rural Northern Alberta, where I represent, and tell me that these individuals are choosing to live intermittently homeless, taking fentanyl to the state of ketosis, where they're risking life and limb, living in what they call encampments, in reality are drug

dens where laceration, rape, and physical violence are regular occurrences as they're extorted for money so they have the right to live there under the drug cartel. It is nuts to say that that is somehow some right that these people are choosing to enact, that the nature of addiction compels you into these tragic states and it restricts you like shackles and a slave to it. There's nothing at all Canadian, nothing at all compassionate about letting people continue down this path of losing limbs to frostbite as they seek drugs and lose a fifth or quarter of their body weight because they're more compelled to seek fentanyl than they are to consume calories to live.

Yeah. Hey, Minister Williams, when will this program be fully up and operational? Well, we committed, pardon me, we committed $180 million to building the first two Compassion Prevention Centers. That's going to start here right away. We introduce some legislation very soon to this end. When the legislation is passed and regulations are in place, we're hoping to see the first folks going through this program as we stand it up in 2026. So it's going to replace PCHAD, which is the Protection of Children Abusing Drugs Act in Alberta.

That's a mandatory treatment regime we've had for decades in Alberta for children. And it's going to be parallel to the mental health act that we have in Alberta for those suffering from mental illness. As every single province has a mental health act for mandatory treatment for those dealing with mental illnesses if they're dangerous themselves or others. And it will obviously be parallel to drug courts, which has mandatory treatment that we have in many provinces already. Minister, we're going to have to leave it there. I've been in conversation with Dan Williams, the Minister of Mental Health and Addiction of Alberta. I look forward to following what I believe will be the success of this program. And I wish you, I wish you well, sir.

Happy to chat any time. Thanks for the time, Ben. At Desjardins, we speak business. We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice, and we can talk your ear off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardins Business, we speak the same language you do, business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardins today. We'd love to talk business.