Jim Watson calls for more beds, better stats to combat opioid crisis

Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson is calling on the federal government to provide more funding for addiction treatment facilities, as well as more timely statistics, to better combat opioid overdoses.

Watson was a guest on CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning Tuesday to discuss mounting public concern about opioid abuse in the city.

Hundreds of parents have packed meeting rooms in Kanata in recent days for more information on the issue — and to equip themselves with naloxone kits to treat overdose victims — after a 14-year-old girl died of an overdose and the father of another girl with an addiction wrote an impassioned public warning.

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The most recent official overdose data comes from 2015. In that year 48 Ottawa residents died from unintentional drug overdoses, 29 of them due to opioids and 14 due to fentanyl specifically.

"That's nowhere near what they're facing, obviously, in British Columbia, but to the families who lost a loved one, a child, that is a crisis," Watson said. "... We just now need more [drug treatment] beds and we need more help to fund those beds."

Listen to the full interview with Watson here.

'We need to get more information'

Watson took part in a conference call about drug use on Friday with other mayors of big cities, as well as federal Health Minister Jane Philpott and Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale.

Along with border security issues and funneling some federal mental health dollars toward drug treatment, the group discussed the availability of overdose statistics.

"A number of mayors talked about this ... the lack of timely data that is available. ... It's almost two years out of date. We need to get more information so that we know where the crises are happening so that we can respond more quickly," Watson said.

"And that's something that the group took away as one of the things they have to do, to speed up the collection and distribution of data so we can do a better job of helping these people save their lives."

As for treatment facilities, Watson said work is underway to build more beds at Ottawa's Dave Smith Youth Treatment Centre, and that Senator Vern White is pushing the federal government to fund still more beds at the centre as construction begins.