A concerned community, someone feared dead now lives: John Rustad's tale of a fatal overdose improves with retelling

The opioid crisis' symptoms, not causes, dominated the election debate, but public opinion is overwhelmingly in favour of action in some key areas where the parties' agendas overlap

Rustad, Eby, Furstenau: the opioid crisis was front and centre from the opening minutes of the October 8 leaders’ debate

The fatal overdose that BC Conservative Party leader John Rustad thought he saw on the street — but did not — on his way to October 8’s televised election debate ensured that the toxic drug crisis was front and centre from the opening minutes of the party leaders’ only head-to-head clash.

The exchange that followed, coming as the province experiences its first slight decline in deaths since 2019, shows how much some policy-makers prefer to focus on the symptoms of the crisis, rather than causes, as the public health emergency enters its eighth year.

“I was on my way over here, and on the corner of Robson and Hornby, there was an individual who died,” Rustad said gravely, “and there were emergency people rushing (around). This person died from an overdose . . . This is the British Columbia that David Eby has created.”

"I think it's becoming commonplace in British Columbia for somebody to be on the street dead,” Rustad added the next day, “and I think that's wrong. British Columbia should not be accepting that as normal.”

Who can disagree?

Yet people dead on the street have long been commonplace in this province, from targeted killings and from the toxic drug crisis, both well underway while Rustad was still a cabinet minister in the government of BC Liberal Premier Christy Clark and for years before that.

This is the British Columbia that poverty, homelessness, inequality, mental illness, dislocation and chronic pain have created, a profit-making paradise for organized crime so large that BC now exports illicit drugs to global markets. The toxic drug supply has made fatal overdoses the province’s leading cause of death, taking about six lives a day.

In the storm of fact-checking that followed Rustad’s overdose sighting, there were reports that peer street workers from the Downtown Eastside’s Overdose Prevention Site may have revived the person Rustad thought dead. Rustad has threatened to close overdose prevention sites.

Based on October 8’s debate, voters can count on Rustad, if elected, to make every effort to push the problem out of sight, out of mind, shutting down harm reduction programs, limiting or closing overdose prevention sites, stepping up involuntary treatment, and declaring “zero tolerance” for open drug use.

“We refuse to accept addiction as a lifestyle choice,” Rustad says. Who does? But the Conservative leader raises an important issue when he questions why BC continues, year after year, to account for a disproportionate share of all overdose deaths in Canada. “That to me is a failure of leadership. That’s weak leadership.”

Premier David Eby’s brave response was to refuse, even in the key debate of the campaign, to pretend that the problem was so simple.

“Anyone who's lost a child or a parent or a loved one or a friend knows the scale of the human tragedy,” Eby replied. “It led us to try things that were unimaginable at certain points. Who would have imagined that there would be an all-party committee and the police chiefs lining up to say, ‘let's try decriminalization. Let's try removing stigma so that people can come forward and ask for help. They don't worry about getting arrested or losing their job.’

“So we tried it, and it didn't produce the results that anybody wanted. Instead of people feeling like they could come forward, people struggling with brain injuries, mental health issues, and addictions felt like they could use drugs anywhere in the province. So, we had to change course. This is a hard problem. [It] won't be solved with simple slogans.”

In many respects, the stark realities of the toxic drug crisis have forced a convergence of Conservative and NDP policies, to the dismay of harm reduction advocates.

The New Democrats have rolled back decriminalization and refused to consider non-prescribed safe supply, as proposed by Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry. Expenditures on treatment and recovery are rising.

Despite Rustad’s apocalyptic rhetoric, the Conservative’s revised platform leaves room for some harm reduction and some overdose prevention sites, but would cut off “government-sanctioned distribution of drugs,” presumably the prescribed alternatives critical to many treatment regimes.

Only Sonia Furstenau’s BC Green Party, supported by former chief coroner Lisa Lapointe, promises to keep the pedal to the floor on harm reduction and safer supply.

Where the parties really part ways is their response to organized crime, the source of billions of dollars’ worth of deadly illicit drugs annually.

Had Rustad been passing Robson and Richards late in the afternoon on March 30, 2024, he might have been forced to dodge a hail of bullets directed at Brothers Keepers associate Jagraj Atwal, who escaped unharmed as bystanders ran for their lives, and customers ducked incoming fire at a nearby Tim Hortons.

Or had he been in Surrey’s Guildford neighbourhood late on December 28, 2020, he might have seen the brutal killing of 14-year-old Tequel Willis, shot eight times as he stepped out of a taxi. Willis, whose killer has not been found, is BC’s youngest victim of a targeted shooting, one of several hundred in the 20 years.

Yet asked directly how he would tackle BC’s death-dealing illegal narcotics industry, Rustad promised only to push for a restored port police force to step up inspections of incoming containers. He was apparently unaware that the Canadian Border Services Agency had held a major news conference that morning hailing more than 60 seizures of methamphetamine pouring from BC’s superlabs into Australia, underlining this province’s premier position in the global drug trade.

NDP leader David Eby (seen here with Surrey Guildford MLA Garry Begg, a former RCMP officer, and Samatha Grey of the Surrey Women’s Centre) has hammered Conservative leader John Rustad for his pledge to suspend enforcement of gun laws regulating assault rifles and hand guns.

No wonder Eby seized the opportunity to remind viewers that Rustad has promised to suspend federal gun laws in this province, even those covering assault weapons, ghost guns and hand guns like those seized from gang members on a regular basis. (He could not legally do so.)

“John Rustad has actually announced that he's not even going to enforce federal gun laws,” Eby said. “He will direct the police not to enforce federal gun laws that prevent [domestic] abusers from accessing guns, that prevent gangsters from buying and selling handguns and semi-automatic weapons. It's ridiculous.” For his part, Eby promised to “go after the gangsters . . . take their cars and their houses and their guns and enforce the law.”

Even before the campaign, the Eby government had undertaken a shake-up of BC’s organized crime enforcement as recommended by a harshly critical review of the response to targeted killings. (The BC Greens have not made any commitments on policing.)

Missing from the October 8 debate were any deeper considerations of the reasons why, as Rustad points out, BC has such a prolonged and destructive overdose crisis, driven by deeper factors in our society that make so many British Columbians vulnerable to addiction.

That may come, soon. A fascinating ResearchCo poll released earlier in the campaign by Save Our Streets, a business and community-driven coalition demanding stronger action against crime and street disorder, found broad support for more drug rehabilitation facilities (83 per cent), more housing for people in recovery (79 per cent), optional diversion to treatment for people charged with minor offences (73 per cent), and even majority support for more “legal supervised injection sites” (63 per cent).

John Rustad’s final version of what he saw on the way to the debate: in every respect, a more hopeful sign of where BC may be headed on the eve of the election.

By the morning after the debate, Rustad’s memory of the fatal overdose was being tested by media scrutiny. There was no doubt his claim was plausible, but was it strictly true? Neither the coroner’s office nor the BC Emergency Health Service had recorded an incident at that location. Street workers from the Overdose Prevention Site said they had assisted someone who was revived, but elsewhere.

Rustad’s team produced a blurry photograph taken from a moving car at a new location, several blocks away. “This is what I saw,” Rustad affirmed, adding, “I’m overjoyed to hear a life was saved thanks to heroic efforts of First Responders.”

A small crowd is gathered, focused on something on the sidewalk, one man crouching to the ground. A concerned community, someone feared dead now lives. In those respects, the final version of Rustad’s story is much better than the first as a sign of where BC is headed as the election nears.