The Alberta government is setting up a 14-member commission with a $30-million budget to deal with the skyrocketing numbers of deaths caused by overdoses of fentanyl and other opioids.
The Minister’s Opioid Emergency Response Commission will be chaired by Dr. Karen Grimsrud, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, and Dr. Elaine Hyshka, an assistant professor of public health at the University of Alberta, who is also involved with the coalition setting up a supervised consumption site in Edmonton.
The commission will make recommendations to the minister on how to corral and coordinate resources and fight what the government is declaring a public health crisis.
Dr. Nicholas Etches, medical officer of health in the Calgary zone, said opioid overdoses killed more Albertans last year than motor vehicle collisions and homicides combined.
“Our aim at this point is to keep people alive,” Grimsrud said.
The government remains reluctant to declare the crisis a public health emergency, as British Columbia has done, because that carries legal implications officials say are not required.
Other people involved in the commission include Petra Schulz, an Edmonton mother whose son died of a fentanyl overdose in 2014, Dr. Esther Tailfeathers, the physician lead for the Aboriginal Health Program with Alberta Health Services, and Marliss Taylor, the registered nurse who is program manager for Streetworks in Edmonton.
Fentanyl killed 113 people in Alberta in the first three months of this year and 363 people in 2016.
Associate minister of health Brandy Payne will announce the Alberta government’s plan to tackle the opioid crisis. (Trevor Wilson/CBC)