The Mounties have repeatedly embarrassed B.C. authorities by revealing instances of "safer supply" opioids being trafficked illegally
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After the British Columbia RCMP kept reporting that government-distributed “safer supply” opioids were showing up in drug busts, a leaked memo has emerged in which the province’s Mounties were allegedly told to step carefully around “hot button issues.”
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“It is very clear we are in a pre-election time period and the topic of ‘public safety’ is very much an issue that governments and voters are discussing,” reads a March 11 email from the headquarters of E Division, the B.C. branch of the RCMP.
Directed at the province’s 150 RCMP detachments, it instructs officers to not directly address potentially controversial topics, instead routing those inquires from journalists and government communications staff, through central HQ. Among a supplied list of potential “hot button issues” are drug seizures and drug decriminalization.
The memo was obtained by the long-form media outlet Northern Beat, which has closely followed the controversies erupting from B.C.’s pursuit of “safer supply.”
In a statement to the National Post, E Division said Northern Beat’s characterization of the memo as a “gag order” was inaccurate.
“Media Relations officers were asked to ensure that internal notifications were flagged and shared with provincial headquarters prior to things being issued so that additional notifications could be completed,” wrote Staff Sgt. Kris Clark, a senior media relations officer at E Division HQ.
Clark added, “no one has been restricted from addressing matters in their jurisdiction and pre-existing Media Relations protocols have not changed … In fact the guidance indicated that we ‘commit to be available to review and ensure timely feedback as it is not our intention on delaying communication efforts.'”
Earlier this year, RCMP detachments in B.C. reported that they had made seizures of black-market hydromorphone tablets that had initially been distributed by the B.C. government as safer supply. In northeastern B.C., Prince George RCMP reported the hydromorphone tablets had been seized along with various street drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine and prescription drugs such as the painkiller and anti-convulsant gabapentin.
“Organized crime groups are actively involved in the redistribution of safe supply and prescription drugs,” Cpl. Jennifer Cooper of the RCMP’s Prince George detachment told the National Post in March.
She added, “it might mean how we regulate our safe supply might need a sober second glance.”
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The month before, Mounties in Campbell River, a city on Vancouver Island, reported the seizure of 3,500 hydromorphone pills, saying they had been diverted into the black market by “a well-organized drug trafficking operation.”
These and other reports all seemed to contradict the consistent claim of B.C. authorities that “diversion” either wasn’t a major problem — or wasn’t happening at all.
In March 2020, B.C. became the world’s first jurisdiction to launch what is called the Safer Opioid Supply program. The plan was to dispense prescribed recreational opioids — usually in the form of hydromorphone pills — as an alternative to addicts relying on the “toxic illegal drug supply.”
But in a May 2023 investigation, National Post correspondent Adam Zivo cited interviews with more than a dozen addiction-medicine specialists and concluded that addicts were routinely obtaining safer supply only to flip it onto the black market for cash.
The consequences of this were two-fold: The “toxic illegal drug supply” was actually being subsidized by the proceeds of reselling safer supply. Meanwhile, that same black market was suddenly being flooded with dirt-cheap hydromorphone.
The phenomenon was so obvious that in October 2023 Zivo reported that a simple search of the website reddit revealed dozens of posts selling diverted “dillies” (a slang term for hydromorphone). “Check the date!! 150 dilly 8mg collected thanks to safe supply vancouver,” read one.
Nevertheless, as recently as June, B.C. chief coroner Lisa Lapointe — a major advocate for safer supply — was publicly declaring that diversion was “not true” and the product of “increasingly polarized rhetoric that is not informed by evidence.”
A February report on safer supply by Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry would acknowledge that “some diversion is occurring,” but characterized it only as a symptom of drug users having “unmet needs.”
RCMP brass, meanwhile, have officially endorsed the government line that diversion is only a scattered phenomenon.
On the same day as the “hot button issues” memo was sent out, the B.C. RCMP sent out an official statement authored by Assistant Commissioner John Brewer saying there “is currently no evidence to support a widespread diversion of safer supply drugs in the illicit market in BC or Canada.”
Brewer added, “we’ve increased awareness to our police officers in order to better identify cases where safer supply drugs may be present within their investigations.”
What both the B.C. RCMP and the provincial government have failed to provide, however, is any data on how much hydromorphone is being seized by police — and what share of distributed safer supply it represents. Northern Beat journalist Fran Yanor reported that the RCMP “hot button issues” memo came just two weeks after B.C. Solicitor General Mike Farnworth reneged on an agreement to provide the publication with hydromorphone seizure data.
“Instead, his office advised in an email that all questions on specific seizure data should now be directed to individual police detachments,” wrote Yanor.
In the RCMP’s Tuesday statement to the National Post, Clark said that a quick review of recent statements from RCMP detachments should show that “no one was directed to ‘route’ media calls to headquarters.” Among these have been several releases detailing continued police seizures of safer supply.
Just this week, Prince George RCMP announced they had busted what appears to be one of the more brazen instances of diversion yet. After a lengthy surveillance operation, Mounties arrested two Prince George men whom they accused of loitering outside pharmacies and offering to trade illicit drugs for any safer supply the user could obtain from pharmacists.
That particular bust was raised in the B.C. legislature this week by Elenore Sturko, the BC United opposition critic for mental health and addiction.
“Someone comes out of a pharmacy with their prescribed safe supply, and is met head on with a drug dealer offering them illicit drugs in exchange for those drugs to be then distributed into the community. It’s pretty evident this is exactly how this problem has become a problem in B.C.,” said Sturko, herself an ex-RCMP officer.
The signature boondoggle of the premiership of Jean Chretien was the federal long gun registry, whose cost ballooned to $2 billion before its ultimate cancellation by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. And now, the signature gun control policy of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is rapidly transforming into a boondoggle of similar size. That would be Trudeau’s ban and buyback of so-callled “assault-style firearms.” The Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association took a $700,000 contract to help implement the program. The group told the National Post this week that the Trudeau ban was so broad and “rushed” that Ottawa is on the hook to buy way more guns – and gun parts – than it ever expected.
If there was any branch of federal governance in which policy promises should be approached with extreme skepticism, it would be the Department of Defence. Multiple times over the past few years, the Trudeau government has promised significant money boosts to the Canadian Armed Forces – only to stay the course on keeping it under-resourced. But one of the big takeaways from a newly announced Trudeau government defence policy is that Canada might consider patrolling its Arctic with “under-ice capable” submarines.
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