Prince George City Councillor Trudy Klassen is back from the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addictions gathering hosted in Lethbridge, Alberta earlier this month.
She was joined by representatives from 30 small cities across the country who continue to work on the first municipally led, integrated standards for treatment, harm reduction, recovery, prevention and enforcement services, policies and strategies.
Klassen told MyPGNow.com there was one item on the table from Cobourg, Ontario that peaked her interest.
“They developed a way to get service agencies to have a certain standard of care in their operations and so that was really interesting and something that I need to study a little bit more.”
Klassen also touched on the importance of the 30-small cities who were in attendance to be a united front when approaching higher levels of government, instead of this divide and conquer strategy.
“The purpose of the event was to develop a handbook for municipalities to give us a tool box in order to deal with these issues and we made it clear that the policy had to be something that works for small cities.”
“We all felt that it had to be something workable and to be able to have some tools as municipalities.”
Between January 2016 and September 2023, over 42,000 people living in Canada died due to apparent opioid toxicity.
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