Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grants - Institute/Initiative Community Support

Canada's drug toxicity crisis continues to cause devastating loss of life amid a volatile, unregulated drug supply. Federal responses have increasingly prioritized enforcement and border-security measures, including the appointment of a Fentanyl Czar, Bills C-2 and C-12, and expanded Canada-U.S. coordination. However, no systematic effort exists to evaluate how these approaches may affect population health. Enforcement-focused policies may reshape drug markets, increase toxicity, affect harm reduction and treatment access, deepen criminalization, and exacerbate health inequities, particularly for racialized communities, Indigenous peoples, and people with precarious immigration status. This planning grant will build the foundation for a future pan-Canadian evaluation of enforcement-focused drug policy, border security, and population health. Guided by a two-part conceptual and planning framework that treats enforcement and border security as upstream structural determinants of health, the project will: (1) map recent policy changes and develop a preliminary mechanism map; (2) engage people who use drugs, families, service providers, public health and policy actors, researchers, and selected enforcement/border-sector knowledge users through a phased, constituency-based consultation process designed to ensure equity and safety; and (3) produce a partner-informed research agenda, governance model, data strategy, knowledge dissemination plan, and CIHR Project Grant roadmap. The project is designed to centre the priorities of populations most affected by enforcement and to document both convergence and divergence across partner perspectives.