British Columbia’s chief coroner Lisa Lapointe says she’s a hopeful person, but she is leaving her office frustrated and disappointed. Angry, even, with drug overdose deaths expected to hit record levels this year.
The B.C. Coroners Service issued a public safety warning Wednesday, citing increases in overdose deaths “above earlier indications,” when 189 deaths were reported in October.
Lapointe has been at the forefront of the province’s battle against toxic drug overdoses for years, but she said the public health emergency that was declared in April 2016 never received a “a co-ordinated response commensurate with the size of this crisis.”
Instead, she lamented a “one-off, beds and projects” response to the emergency that the B.C. Coroners Service says has claimed more than 13,000 lives in the past 7½ years.
“We see these ad hoc announcements but sadly what we haven’t seen is a thoughtful, evidence-based, data-driven plan for how we are going to reduce the number of deaths in our province,” Lapointe said in an interview Monday.
Lapointe, who retires in February, said she was particularly worried about what she feared was the creep of politics into vital public health decisions surrounding overdose policies.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre said Monday a government led by him would do more to normalize cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum in Canada to “decentralize” the economy and reduce the influence of central bankers.
that accepts bitcoin as payment, Poilievre said that over the course of the COVID-19 crisis the Bank of Canada created “$400 billion in cash out of thin air” through its policy of quantitative easing — a development he blames for inflation hitting a 30-year high and housing prices reaching all-time record levels.
As the party’s finance critic, Poilievre has railed against the policy because he, like some conservative-minded economists, sees the government’s ability to print money — which can devalue existing dollars — as a form of taxation.
Poilievre said he’d work with the provinces and territories to eliminate a “cobweb of contradictory rules” that govern crypto and blockchain — the system which records bitcoin and other cryptocurrency transactions.
But bitcoin has had a volatile run in recent months as central banks have increased interest rates to tackle pandemic-driven inflation, making speculative investments less attractive.
In February, Poilievre appeared on a cryptocurrency podcast hosted by a bitcoin trader who has promoted COVID-19 conspiracies and has compared central banking policies to slavery and Nazi Germany.
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