A former N.W.T. MLA lost his son to fentanyl. He wants to talk about it

Wally Schumann was shocked when he got the call. It was the Hay River RCMP, asking if he could meet them at his house. 

"Out in the driveway, the RCMP officer — you know, bless his soul — had to tell me that our son had passed away and he didn't know the details at that exact moment. He was just asked to come do this."

Schumann, a long-time resident of Hay River, N.W.T., and a former territorial cabinet minister, had spoken to his son on the phone that morning, in one of their usual early-bird chats. 

CJ, who was 27, had called from Grande Prairie, Alta., to let his dad know he'd be a day late coming home from giving a friend a ride south. 

Schumann checked his phone later: the call had come in at 5:09 a.m. CJ was found non-responsive around 8:30. He had died after taking cocaine laced with fentanyl. 

"That's how quickly this stuff happens," Schumann said. 

Schumann had known his son and his friends smoked weed, but the use of harder drugs was news to him.

"I had no idea that he was doing this on a casual basis because I never seen it," Schumann said, "and I had a very close relationship with my son, more than most people, so …[it] totally took us by surprise when we got the call."

Since then, Schumann says he's had many conversations with people who've lost loved ones to deadly opioids, many of whom were as surprised as he was. 

Now, he wants to talk about it. 

"Fentanyl is very prominent in our society and it's killed a lot of people and it does not hold back on who it kills."

CJ died a little over a year ago, in December 2021. Since then, Hay River, a community of about 3,200 people, has suddenly found itself in the middle of Canada's opioid crisis. On Jan. 24, health officials announced that the N.W.T. saw six opioid deaths last year — all of them in Hay River and most linked to crack cocaine laced with fentanyl and carfentanil. 

CJ was born in Hay River and went to school there until Grade 8, when he left to attend school in B.C. He spent a year at the University of Victoria before returning north for an apprenticeship in the parts department at the Diavik Diamond Mine. When that was over, he returned to Vancouver with "a bunch of his friends" before taking a job at Ekati, another of the N.W.T.'s diamond mines. 

Schumann spent time with some of those friends in Vancouver at a celebration of life they held for his son.