CALGARY—Just upstairs from city council chambers, Councillor Evan Woolley keeps a photo of his brother in his city hall office.

Woolley took the shot of Cameron Mutch himself on a family vacation in Priddis, Alta. Mutch, sporting jean shorts and messy hair, stands in front of his big blue Toyota Tundra — a reminder of his larger-than-life presence and the way he was always available to help, whatever the job.

Mutch “ripped up to Airdrie” in that truck during Calgary’s 2013 flood and bought 10 pumps, Woolley says. He spent the next two weeks helping pump river-water out of people’s basements.

“I feel like the guy with the truck was always that guy,” Woolley says. “But he was that guy.”

He and Mutch are technically half-brothers but “very much the same person,” Woolley says. People often talked about how similar their sense of humour was, how their laugh sounded the same.

Recently, however, Woolley’s stories of his brother are about loss. Woolley has spoken publicly of Mutch’s life and death more than once in recent months, as councillors try to define the city’s role in combating the opioid crisis.

Mutch was working a construction job in the summer of 2017 when he fell down a flight of stairs and badly hurt his back. A doctor gave him a prescription for opioids, but when it ran out, Mutch couldn’t stop. He started seeking the drug from other sources.

Eventually, Mutch acknowledged he needed help and spent 30 days at a B.C. rehab facility. He and his family had hope that things were getting better.

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But just days after coming home, on April 7, 2018, Mutch died from an accidental overdose. He was 34. The family later found out the drugs that killed him were laced with fentanyl.

Mutch is one of at least 582 people in Alberta who died from an apparent opioid poisoning related to fentanyl last year. Nearly half of those deaths were in Calgary. Alberta Health has yet to release a full accounting of the deaths of 2018, with the most recent statistics covering Jan. 1 to Nov. 11, 2018.

On average in 2018, 13 people died from accidental drug poisoning per week in Alberta. That’s up from 11 per week the year before. However, Alberta Health says the increase in deaths has slowed, suggesting overdose deaths could be levelling out.

Woolley hopes that telling his brother’s story might help others feel more comfortable talking about addiction and draw attention to the many barriers that keep people from getting help.

“We as a family thought it was in nobody’s interests to pretend what happened didn’t happen,” he says. “We talked about the importance that we know other families are struggling, because there’s a certain stigma associated with it.

“I think he would’ve been OK with it if it can help other people get better.”

Woolley is in a unique position as Ward 8 councillor, representing a central area of the city that’s home to Calgary’s only supervised consumption site at the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre. It offers a safer and hygienic area for people to use drugs, overseen by trained staff. The site also connects people to health and social services, and staff can administer naloxone to reverse opioid overdoses.

The site opened in October 2017 but has recently become a fraught topic, especially for Woolley. His constituents have told him that increasing methamphetamine use is leading to scary situations. A recent Calgary police report backed that up, showing an increase in emergency response calls to the area.

Woolley supports the site. He says he wishes his brother could have been somewhere safe the day he overdosed. But he also says changes need to happen to ensure the site can keep saving lives.

City council recently approved a list of 12 possible changes Woolley brought forward for the site. They’ll be discussing them further this week.

He also wrote a letter to the prime minister’s office last week, copied to Premier Rachel Notley and health officials at the provincial and federal level, asking for more co-operation from the other levels of government to help Calgary address addiction and public safety.

“This problem is coming at us fast. So we have to move quickly,” he says. “There needs to be really good co-ordination, and resources need to be brought to bear.”

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Woolley says he can relate to the way people who live near the Chumir Health Centre say they’re sometimes afraid in their own neighbourhood.

“There were times that my family was scared. Because (Cameron) was not himself. There comes, I think, a point where you lose them. It becomes scary when you get low like that,” he says.

“You scale that down to the individual, the family in their individual houses ... Now you’ve scaled that up to a lot more people in a bigger neighbourhood. The challenges are showing themselves in a similar way.”

Petra Schulz is a co-founder of Moms Stop the Harm, a Canada-wide advocacy group that pushes for policy change to deliver better supports for people who struggle with substance use. Schulz, who lives in Edmonton, strongly supports access to opioid agonist treatments like methadone and suboxone, which help keep opioid users stable and reduce the risk of an overdose.

Her son Danny was 25 when he died after an accidental overdose in 2014. Awareness and access to supports have improved since then, she says, but many families still can’t afford to send their loved ones to the treatment centres or counselling they need.

She still hears stories like Woolley’s all the time.

“We have members whose kids died right out of treatment or even in treatment,” Schulz said.

When she was trying to find help for her son, “nobody explained opioid use to us and the risk of relapse. Nobody explained how evidence-based treatment should look. Nobody explained harm reduction.”

Schulz wants to see people get more help in finding the right treatment, as it often falls to informal networks. She says the large and often confusing web of public and private treatment options warrants the help of someone like a patient navigator, who are sometimes in place to help people with serious health conditions like cancer move through the health system.

Her group faces friction caused by the shaming of people with addictions. Schulz sees that shame clearly in some of the headlines and online conversations about the Chumir.

“Our kids weren’t ‘scumbags.’ They were people we loved,” she says. “To have somebody call them scumbags, it’s really upsetting. And what it also does is it drives people further away from getting help.”

Woolley says that since he’s spoken out about his brother, he’s heard from families who don’t know where to turn, asking whether he can help them find the money to keep their family members in treatment a little longer.

“That’s a devastating thing,” he says.

“Whoever that’s happening to, you love them a lot ... Some of the resources aren’t hitting right where they need to be, but there are supports out there.”

It’s been less than a year since Mutch died. And Woolley says even as the family looks for ways his story can help others, they feel the loss deeply.

“When I look to see him in other people, I’ll often see the guy in the big, shiny truck who looks really successful and looks like a big contractor, and say, ‘That could have been him,’” Woolley says.

“And then I’ll be driving down the street and see someone who is clearly down and out and think, ‘That could have been him.’”

Woolley and one of his sisters both welcomed sons just months after they lost their brother. Both of them gave their boys the middle name Cameron.

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