18,000 lives later, B.C. marks 10 years since declaring overdose emergency

Inside the legislature on Tuesday, Claire Rattee, the Opposition Conservative critic for mental health and addictions, said the NDP government continues to push failed policies like safe supply, “in the face of growing evidence of harm.”

She noted recent comments from Dr. Daniel Vigo who said that safe supply is “actually a disincentive for treatment” and that harm reduction for people with severe mental illness amounts to “harm enhancement.”

Vigo is B.C.’s chief scientific adviser for psychiatry, toxic drugs and concurrent disorders.

B.C. Health Minister Josie Osborne said in reply during question period that the government has hired Vigo to provide “very specific advice” about people with acquired brain injuries, in the face of the changing nature of the toxic drug crisis.

Osborne said the anniversary is a “sombre” one, and her government continues to focus on separating people from unregulated toxic drugs, and building care for them.

She says harm reduction measures work and have prevented “thousands and thousands and thousands” of deaths.

The anniversary comes amid grief for the people who have died and calls for the government to do more.

An online post from the Vancouver-based Canadian Drug Policy Coalition says over the past 10 years the urgency of the declaration seems to have “ebbed away,” alongside the government’s willingness to use the powers that it grants.

“It feels impossible to separate the personal from the political, the specific grief of individual losses from the collective, cumulative exhaustion of so much loss,” the post says.

“This is compounded by witnessing the ongoing crush of a system that actively harms people, and the ways decisionmakers continue to prop it up.”

Once seen as being on the cutting edge of drug policy, the B.C. government has ended a drug decriminalization pilot program and rolled back key parts of its safer supply policy

Premier David Eby has said decriminalization “didn’t work,” but Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said Monday that she “absolutely” believed “there was political pressure” to stop the three-year trial, which removed criminal penalties for those caught with small amounts of certain illicit drugs for personal use.

Osborne announced in January that B.C. would not apply for an extension to decriminalization because it had not delivered the results that government hoped for.

The coalition, which works with more than 100 organizations across Canada, is calling on all provinces and territories to act with urgency to address the ongoing crisis.

“On this anniversary, we send our love, sorrow and rage to everyone who is mourning, who is angry, who is weary, who is trying. We remember and honour the people we have lost,” the statement says.

There were 1,833 overdose deaths in B.C. last year, a 21 per cent decrease from 2024, but almost four times the toll in 2014.

— With files from Wolfgang Depner in Victoria

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 14, 2026

Ashley Joannou, The Canadian Press

by The Canadian Press

18,000 lives later, B.C. marks 10 years since declaring overdose emergency

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