Mark Carney’s new public health chief won’t admit fentanyl is deadly

As the opioid crisis rages on, taking the lives of predominantly young Canadian men, Dr. Joss Reimer dodges a simple yes-or-no question on Canada’s failing “harm reduction” experiment.

Tamara Ugolini
  |   May 13, 2026   |   News Analysis   |   4 Comments

Conservative MP and Shadow Health Minister Dan Mazier asked Mark Carney’s brand-new Chief Public Health Officer a question any honest doctor should answer in a heartbeat: Is consuming or injecting illegal fentanyl safe?

Dr. Joss Reimer couldn’t give a straightforward answer.

Instead, she responded with bureaucratic word salad about “complex responses” and “safer options.”

This is the woman now in charge of Canada’s public health messaging under the Carney government; the top public health voice in the country that refuses to tell Canadians the obvious: street fentanyl is poison. It’s killing dozens of Canadians every single day.

Remember the heroin and cocaine epidemics during the 80s and 90s? Health officials then had the guts to call out the despair and destruction addiction causes.

Today? They hand out kits to school children on how to snort it.

Since 2017, the Liberals have poured more than one billion dollars into the Canadian Drugs and Substances Strategy and so-called “safer supply” programs.

British Columbia, the poster child for this experiment since 2016, has watched illicit drug deaths more than double — from 994 in 2016 to 2,293 in 2022.

Nationally, fentanyl accounts for 58% of all opioid deaths.

With an average of 16 Canadians dying every single day, that’s over 5,700 lives in the last 12 months alone.

Since 2016, more than 55,000 Canadians have been lost, and a staggering 74% of these deaths are in young men — those aged 30 to 39 and 40 to 49. These are fathers, sons, partners, and workers in the prime of their lives, with decades of potential still ahead of them.

Opioids have become one of the leading causes of death for young Canadians.

“Safer supply,” put simply, is just more supply.

It’s well documented that prescribed “safer” drugs are being diverted to the street, as toxic fentanyl continues to flood communities unabated.

Public spaces have been turned into open-air drug markets, and criminality rages on. Families are left to watch their loved ones deteriorate while Ottawa bureaucrats can call it “complex” and cry about access instead of abstinence.

It’s less about compassion and more about ideological capture.

The same people pushing supervised consumption sites and safer supply won’t even admit that highly addictive, potent fentanyl is unsafe. That would collapse the entire “harm reduction” fantasy.

Instead, what Canadians have gotten is the normalization of addiction rather than a fight for recovery. Health policy that enables dealers while pretending to help users. And it’s Canadian families, communities and civilians left to pick up the pieces in war-zone streets from Vancouver to Toronto to Winnipeg and once sleepy small towns like Cobourg, Ontario.

What Canada needs now are leaders who will acknowledge the obvious: Fentanyl kills, and addiction destroys.

The answer isn’t handing out more drugs — it’s real treatment, real recovery, real enforcement, and telling young people the truth: Don’t do drugs.

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Tamara Ugolini

Senior Editor

Tamara Ugolini is an informed choice advocate turned journalist whose journey into motherhood sparked her passion for parental rights and the importance of true informed consent. She critically examines the shortcomings of "Big Policy" and its impact on individuals, while challenging mainstream narratives to empower others in their decision-making.

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COMMENTS

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  • Fran g
    commented 2026-05-20 13:58:10 -0400
    Nothing to see here. Just another in a long stream of incompetent, stupid, puppet put in by carnage, the worst pm in history (surprisingly worse than trudumb and his horrible father pet)
  • Bruce Atchison
    commented 2026-05-13 21:19:10 -0400
    This is just one more reason Alberta MUST leave confederation. This federation has given us the con for more than a hundred years. Now we have an Ottawa health minister saying that poison isn’t poison. Intoxicants are harmful. That’s why “toxic” is in the word.
  • Bernhard Jatzeck
    commented 2026-05-13 20:37:12 -0400
    She’s as useless as her predecessor.
  • Roger Mills
    commented 2026-05-13 18:43:45 -0400
    Another AWFUL Woman. We need more Conservative people in positions of power
    Having a high Education does now make intelligence or Common Sense.
    A Western Civilization has become less Religious, it has been replaced with Cults. Climate change, LGBT——, Transgenderism, Islamism, No Morals, No Common Sense.