RUSTAD: Nothing dignified about watching human beings decay in public while calling it compassion

The following is a commentary which was posted by BC Conservative leader John Rustad, on his "X" account:


There’s a line the NDP keeps parroting, this idea that their policies are about “dignity.”

Dignity in drug use.

Dignity in letting people inject on sidewalks.

Dignity in handing out government opioids like they’re vitamins.

It’s all a fantasy. A slogan. A shield.

Because let’s be brutally honest: there is no dignity in addiction.

Not for the person trapped in it.

Not for the community watching their neighborhood collapse under the weight of it.

Not for the families praying every night that their son or daughter survives another day.

Addiction steals dignity.

There is nothing dignified about what the NDP has done. Nothing dignified about pretending addiction is a lifestyle choice. Nothing dignified about watching human beings decay in public while calling it compassion. 

The government’s job is not to validate despair. It’s to pull people out of it. That means recovery. That means structure. That means interrupting the cycle instead of subsidizing it. It means recognizing that enabling someone to die slowly is not mercy, & let me be clear this is moral cowardice, dressed up as NDP policy.

Enough of this. Enough pretending that the Downtown Eastside is some inevitable tragedy we’re powerless to stop. Enough sanctimony from politicians, NGO's, or academics, who have never once walked those streets at night, never once seen what their policies really produce.

This is an emergency, a real one,with real human beings at stake.

And if we care about their dignity, if we care about their lives, if we care about the communities being torn apart, then we need to reverse these laws, and force treatment, and treat this like the emergency that it is.