A forthcoming law that will force the closure of supervised drug consumption sites near schools and daycares will also affect sites in Toronto homeless shelters, the province confirmed to CBC News.
Last week, Premier Doug Ford’s government said it would ban supervised consumption sites — which allow people to inject, snort or otherwise take street drugs under supervision to reduce the risk of overdose — within 200 metres of schools and child-care centres. In total, 10 facilities across the province will be forced to stop providing these services by the end of March 2025. Five of them are in Toronto.
While no homeless shelters were included on the list, a spokesperson for the provincial health ministry told CBC Toronto that sites within homeless shelters will also have to close.
“If they offer drug consumption and are located within 200m of a school or daycare, they will be impacted by our proposed legislation, if passed,” wrote Alexandra Adamo, chief of staff to Health Minister Sylvia Jones, in an email.
The province’s new rules will force more than half of the supervised injection sites in Ontario to either transition into treatment centres or close down — a move that Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario CEO Doris Grinspun calls ‘a death sentence for people that use substances.’
There are four shelters within the city that currently offer supervised consumption services. The facilities, called Urgent Public Health Needs Sites (UPHNS), are only accessible to shelter residents, and don’t accept walk-ins from the general public.
At least two of them — Homes First’s Bathurst-Lakeshore location on the Harbourfront and Seaton House in Moss Park — have schools or daycares located within 200 metres of them, according to a CBC Toronto analysis using Google Maps. A third site in Liberty Village doesn’t appear to have a school or a daycare within a 200 metre radius.
CBC Toronto couldn’t determine whether the fourth location — a COVID-19 recovery and isolation site for people experiencing homelessness in Etobicoke — would be affected because the city didn’t provide an exact address.
Supervised sites save lives, shelter executive says
Mark Potvin, director of client services with Homes First, said he’s concerned for shelter residents because supervised consumption sites prevent overdoses from becoming fatal.
“When we don’t have a safe consumption site or a supervised consumption site, that increases the amount of people that pass away in the shelter system because it causes usage to go up, to become more hidden,” he said.
“They’ll use in the bathrooms, they’ll use in hallways, and part of the concern with this is that people will overdose, and there won’t actually be any supports there to save their life.”
Ontario is introducing new rules for supervised drug consumption sites, including banning all locations within 200 metres of schools or child-care centres. It comes more than a year after a woman was killed by stray bullet outside a Leslieville community health centre. As CBC’s Dale Manucdoc reports, some residents in that area have been asking for this change.
Potvin said approximately 50 shelter residents use the supervised consumption site at Homes First’s Harbourfront location on a monthly basis, and that no one has died at the site. That’s because, if someone using drugs at the site show signs of overdosing, staff help treat them with oxygen and the fast-acting drug naloxone, he said.
“It also will have a profound impact, creating loss for clients in the shelter system who have lost their friends,” he said.
“The amount of grief that causes actually does cause negative impact on mental health, on addictions.”
The shelter sites were opened beginning in late 2020 in response to a spike in overdose deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, when access to harm reduction services was limited by physical distancing requirements and lockdowns.
Toronto recorded 1,496 non-fatal and 70 fatal overdoses within its shelter system in 2021, up from 316 and 11, respectively, in 2018. Those numbers declined to 796 and 43 last year.
“City of Toronto staff are continuing to work to understand the extent of the changes to determine how they will be implemented and how it could affect programs in the shelter system,” spokesperson Elise von Scheel said in an email.
Province funding treatment and recovery centres instead
In announcing and defending the ban, Ford and Jones have argued that it’s inappropriate to have the centres in neighbourhoods with schools and daycares. They cited complaints from residents about needles being found on the ground and crimes being committed within the vicinity of the sites.
The province also said it would be investing $378 million in 19 new Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) Hubs. Supervised consumption sites that are being forced to close will be given the option to transition into a treatment hub.
But critics and organizations that work with people who use drugs say the decision ignores evidence showing that the centres reduce overdose deaths, prevent the transmission of infectious diseases and offer a pathway to addictions recovery treatment.
“Harm reduction … doesn’t just keep everybody safe, including the community and also schools and parks and child-care facilities, but it also keeps people alive so that we can support people to access treatment … and exit homelessness,” Potvin said.