Ten years after B.C.’s public health emergency declaration came as a result of rising drug-related deaths, as many as five people continue to die every day in the province as the provincial government attempts to tackle an increasingly unpredictable economy.
Though the number of deaths has gone down nearly 30 per cent since the peak in 2023, experts are mostly pessimistic when it comes to the future of the problem after what they say has been over a decade of poor policy-making on provincial and federal levels. Off the heels of the emergency declaration, then-chief coroner Lisa Lapointe ordered the first of three death review panels in 2017, where over 20 subject matter experts analyzed research and studied 1,854 deaths over the first 19 months of the declaration before releasing a report with their findings and 11 “priority actions” for the government to take to curb the quickly growing number of deaths at the time.
One of the most alarming findings in Lapointe’s perspective was that many of the deceased had previously accessed substance treatment or detox programs, while some were even residents at recovery houses when they died.
When users would take breaks from using a drug, they would lose their tolerance to the drug; and when relapses happen, a drug as potent as fentanyl can be fatal, says Lapointe. Despite this, there was no dedicated regulation under the Community Care and Assisted Living Act specific to substance-use treatment facilities.
“Anybody could charge anything and provide any treatment that they said was valuable. There were no regulations for treatment, nor were there any regulations to report outcomes for treatment,” she said. “Those were recommendations (we made) to the government, to regulate treatment and require outcome reporting, so at least we’d have some sense of what’s happening with this group of people that are going for treatment.”
Since the report, there has been some patchwork legislation passed requiring trauma-informed training and first aid training for substance use facilities to be licensed. However, there are still huge gaps in the system – a regular pattern when it comes to B.C.’s drug-related policy making in the past decade, experts say.
From her perspective, among the most challenging things she sees is when the B.C. government announces new treatment beds with such sparse legislation.
“In fact, we don’t have any idea what that means when they announce a bed. What does that mean in terms of addressing the crisis or helping the people experiencing substance use disorder? They have no idea,” said Lapointe.
Risk Mitigation Guidance
When it comes to the most important policies the province has passed over the decade, Lapointe and Jaime Arredondo of UVic’s Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research (CISUR) point to five: the three-year decriminalization pilot, the opening of overdose prevention services, the rollout of drug checking services, naloxone, and the safer supply experiment.
Though drug-checking services are still going strong and naloxone is readily available, decriminalization was not renewed after 2025, further restrictions came to the safer supply program in early 2026, and some users still rely on “unsanctioned” overdose prevention sites as rural communities continue to lack the service and other sites struggle with funding.
Arredondo uses Europe, mainly Portugal, as an example of good policy making in curbing drug overdoses, where drugs were already an accepted and understood part of the country as a result of the nightlife. When heroin took hold and HIV cases soared, governments and elected officials quickly worked together to pass sweeping treatment, policing and prevention legislation.
“The Europeans were able to see harm reduction as a non-political issue, meaning neither left nor right (were) like, ‘This is a bad policy issue.’ They literally said, ‘We are going to have an evidence-based solution to a problem,’ and they started doing it 30 years ago,” said Arredondo. “So even if there was a shift of government from the left to the right, they understood that these were evidence-based policies.
Jaime
What’s next
As the Legislature continues to struggle to address the crisis – along with a declining economy – the province has seen a decline in deaths in 2024 and 2025. Experts have a hard time attributing reasons for why the decline happened. They point at the pilot programs and the expanded treatment funding, the availability of naloxone and harm reduction. Most experts and policymakers Victoria News talked to said it’s possible so many people have died that the numbers of new users can’t keep up with the deaths.
In January 2026, two people died every week in Greater Victoria. With numbers still so high, it’s hard not to question when and how the province will move forward with addressing the crisis while trying to appease voters, taxpayers, and community members.
Though details are still sparse, Premier David Eby and the Conservative Opposition both ran in the 2024 election with platforms on expanding involuntary care. Eby has already approved dozens of new long-term involuntary care beds across the province.
Lapointe questioned the choice to invest further in involuntary treatment rather than address that many factors that lead people to homelessness an addiction in the first place: poverty, housing, mental health support, and access to health care. There are still questions in the air, she says, like what would happen after someone would go through the treatment – would they end up back in the same dire circumstances that led them to be involuntarily admitted in the first place?
“But it satisfies a certain segment of the public that says, ‘OK, good, we took them off, we talked them off, we treated them, end of story.’ And our government knows that. The premier is not a stupid man, but it’s pandering to a political sentiment that I suppose government thinks is the most effective for getting re-elected.”
“I find myself so often so angry that these human beings are dying, and our government is just basically doing nothing. Just deflecting,” she added.
With the U.S. upping pressure to address the flow of fentanyl, and Conservative governments in Ontario and Alberta funding policing rather than harm reduction policies, the next 10 years of B.C.’s crisis are uncertain at best.
“Maybe there will be a federal Conservative or a B.C. Conservative government, and we will have to find ways of trying to help other people that we know in some way. Now, we’re really in a time where if you had a crystal ball, we need to clean it because it’s grey all over and it’s hard to see inside. But saying that, I also find hope in the initiatives that community organizations do.
“The people who have a direct interest in the lives of other people will always find ways to help them,” he added. “I think we need to make an effort to try to recognize their value, to support them, and it’s going to be tough times for everybody, right? I wish sometimes I’d be more positive, but right now… things look bleak.”