OTTAWA — Set to close under new Ontario legislation, nine supervised drug consumption sites will soon become new homelessness and addiction treatment centres.
Under new policy announced earlier this year, the shooting galleries-turned-HART (Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment) hubs are located in Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, Kitchener, Guelph and Thunder Bay.
Ontario is spending $378 million to open 19 HART hubs across the province, Health Minister Sylvia Jones said in a statement issued Thursday.
“We have heard loud and clear from families across Ontario that drug injection sites near schools and child-care centres are making our communities less safe,” Jones said.
Jones announced the policy in August, which banned supervised consumption sites within 200 metres of schools and childcare centres — an attempt to mitigate rampant crime, violence and anti-social behaviour that’s become common around these sites.
Leslieville’s contentious South Riverdale Community Health Centre was the site of last summer’s shooting death of 44-year-old mother Karolina Huebner-Makurat, an innocent pedestrian killed by a stray bullet during a gunfight between drug dealers.
Khalila Zara Mohammed, 24, who worked in the centre’s harm-reduction program, pleaded guilty earlier this month to being an accessory after the fact, while a second charge of obstructing justice was withdrawn.
Court heard she was in a relationship with one of the accused shooters, Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim, who was treated by a nurse inside the Leslieville shooting gallery before being given an Uber ride away from the crime scene.
Mohammed also helped Ibrahim find a place in Pickering to lay low during the investigation.
South Riverdale is one of the four Toronto community health centres chosen for the transition, as well as Regent Park at Dundas and Parliament, Parkdale Queen West at Bathurst and Richmond, and at Toronto Public Health at Dundas and Victoria.
All provincially-funded sites were able to submit an application to become a HART hub, which the province expects to be operational by the end of March — the date the now-outlawed consumption sites were set to close.
Locations for the other 10 sites will be announced in the coming weeks.
While praising the province for funding the HART Hub destined for her riding of Kitchener Centre, Green Party Deputy Leader Aislinn Clancy said the new centres won’t end the province’s overdose issue.
“I’m grateful that our Kitchener community will be receiving funding for the creation of a HART Hub. But I want to be clear that the Ford government’s harm reduction cuts are going to claim lives,” she said in a statement.
“People are not going to stop using drugs simply because we take harm reduction services away or threaten jail time. When CTS (Consumption and Treatment Services) sites close, we’re only going to see more public drug use, more infectious disease spread and more drug poisonings showing up in our ERs.”
While the new sites will not provide drugs to clients, nor will they supervise consumption or provide needles, they will provide primary care, support for mental health and addition, social services and employment assistance.
“HART Hubs will also add an estimated 375 highly supportive housing units, in addition to addiction recovery and treatment beds, that will help thousands of people each year transition to more stable long-term housing,” Jones said in her statement.
HART Hubs are eligible for four times the funding provided to them when they operated as shooting galleries, as well as a one-time grant for start-up costs.
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