Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called for harsher drug trafficking penalties and an end to drug supply programs during a visit to Kitchener’s Victoria Park on Friday morning. He was joined by Kitchener Centre MP Kelly DeRidder, who earlier this year said she once slept on a bench in the park while battling homelessness and drug addiction. “Where was the bench?” Poilievre asked DeRidder on Friday during the news conference. “On the other side,” DeRidder replied, motioning across the park. DeRidder shared her story in the House of Commons in May, introducing a private member’s bill shortly after that would see drug traffickers face harsher penalties and make court-ordered treatment possible. The Kitchener Centre MP insisted that change is needed before others face the struggles she once encountered. “Addiction is not a distant issue. it’s here in our streets, in our homes, and in the lives of the people that we love,” DeRidder said on Friday. “We cannot keep shifting responsibility... we cannot keep building systems that leave people waiting until it’s too late.” Their call comes during a week that saw Region of Waterloo Public Health issue an extended community drug alert, with a reported 25 suspected overdoses and three suspected drug-related deaths from August 14 to August 17. Officials say between January 1 and July 31, there have been more than one thousand opioid-related paramedic service calls – twice the number as the same period in 2025. Poilievre echoed DeRidder’s sentiment before shifting his focus to safe consumption safes and the federal government’s “safe supply experiment.” “It is not compassionate to leave them face first on the pavement, where they will die of a drug overdose,” he said. “The falsely named programs that they call harm reduction and safe supply... it’s all garbage.” Harm reduction advocates say there are more factors at play, than those looking for their services. “We shouldn’t be blaming folks who are doing harm reduction for the crisis that is afoot,” said Julie Kalbfleisch, the public engagement director at Sanguen Health Centre. “We’re certainly not in any way trying to contribute to the crisis... we are simply here trying to keep people alive,” she said. “We know that there’s a long wait for folks to get into treatment who are ready to go to treatment and those are the folks that we should really be focusing on and wanting to help,” Kalbfleisch said. Kalbfleisch also said true recovery involves a long-term plan without mandatory treatment. DeRidder’s Bill C-240, the Offender Rehabilition Act, has now gone to committee following a second reading in the House of Commons on June 1.
