Now that more than a month has passed since Ontario’s Conservative government announced the province would be closing 10 of its 17 supervised injection sites, there is some very interesting manoeuvring going on in harm reduction circles.
The injection site that I live across the street from, in the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, just east of downtown Toronto, has a particularly pressing conundrum. The province has given South Riverdale and the other nine sites being closed for being within 200 metres of schools and daycares until March 31, 2025, to wind down their operations.
The South Riverdale site may not even have that long. For any injection site in Canada to operate, it must apply to Health Canada to receive an exemption to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, which still considers the street drug most often injected at such sites, fentanyl, an illicit substance. South Riverdale’s exemption expires on Nov. 30, and without it, supervised injection services cannot lawfully be carried out.
My neighbourhood has been aware of this date since a mother of two young children, Karolina Huebner-Makurat, was killed by bullet when three drug dealers operating around the site allegedly drew their guns during an altercation in front of the centre on July 7, 2023.
Following this tragedy, South Riverdale waited for the government of Doug Ford to weigh in on the future of the site before applying to renew its federal exemption. Since the August closure announcement, South Riverdale has advised that it not only plans to apply to extend its exemption from Nov. 30 to at least March 31, 2025, when the province has ordered it to close, it’s reportedly confident that Health Canada will approve it.
Which is where things get interesting. In closing 10 of its sites, the province also announced that none will be permitted to open in a new location and no new sites will be allowed.
While some harm reductionists seem to believe Ford is going to walk back his decision before the March closure date, I’m not so sure. On Sept. 17, I attended the Safety of Our Cities Conference, held this year in Mississauga, Ont., at which Ford was a featured speaker. While addressing a room full of law enforcement leaders from across North America, the premier made a specific reference to his recent decision to close 10 “unsafe injection sites,” which he claimed are nothing but magnets for drug dealers who cause harm and chaos to neighbourhoods.
“If it had been up to me,” said Ford, “I would have closed all of them.”
So much for walking anything back.
After the conference, I began looking into what the exemption expiry dates were for other injection sites in Ontario, which Health Canada lists on its website. In an interesting bit of timing, the exemption expiry for a site in Ottawa operated by Ottawa Inner City Health called The Trailer is on Sept. 30.
The Trailer is one of three injection sites located in the very same Ottawa ward, Rideau-Vanier. None of the three are within 200 metres of schools or daycares, so after 10 Ontario sites close next year, Rideau-Vanier will be home to 43 per cent of the province’s injection sites.
I reached out to the city councillor for Rideau-Vanier, Stéphanie Plante, to see if she had any insight into how The Trailer had demonstrated community support, an important requirement of the application process. Plante, who claims to have more injection sites than any other ward or riding in the country, was floored. No one had informed her that The Trailer’s federal drug law exemption was about to expire.
On Sept. 20, Plante sent an email to the CEO of Ottawa Inner City Health, Rob Boyd, asking if they had applied to Health Canada to renew their exemption. Boyd has yet to respond.
Plante also sent an email to Jeremy Proulx, the Director of Parliamentary Affairs for the Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, Ya’ara Saks. Plante explained that Ottawa Inner City Health had not notified or consulted key stakeholders in her ward about The Trailer’s exemption deadline or application to renew — not the Ottawa police, Ottawa Public Health, the local Business Improvement Area and community association, nearby schools and daycares or even the staff at the shelter that rents the site its space.
Given that the robust community engagement promised when injection sites were first introduced in Ontario had seemingly been bypassed, “in addition to the fact that this site has been a consistent source of concerns, from recentshootings and stabbings, rats and social disorder,” wrote Plante, she formally requested that Minister Saks issue a notice that would trigger a 60-day community engagement process through Health Canada, something that the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act gives the minister the power to do.
If Health Canada and Ottawa Inner City Health were hoping to renew the site’s exemption under virtual cover of night, it was too late — Plante got the sun to rise a little earlier than expected.
I sent about a dozen queries to both Minister Saks’ office and Jennifer Saxe, the Health Canada official who oversees its Orwellian-named exemption directorate. I asked questions such as: Why did The Trailer site in Ottawa not conduct transparent outreach with all the stakeholders listed by Councillor Plante?
And: Will the minister or Health Canada agree to Plante’s request and order a 60-day community engagement period?
And: Given the mounting evidence of crime and disorder outside of these sites, is it wise to leave it to the sites alone in their renewal applications to represent the views of those raising children and running businesses nearby?
On Wednesday, I heard back from Health Canada spokesperson Mark Johnson, who issued a brief statement that answered precisely none of my questions.
Health Canada’s Jennifer Saxe did confirm to Plante, though, that The Trailer had indeed submitted an application to renew its exemption. Saxe also disclosed that because injection sites have requirements for community engagement, “the Ministerial authority to give notice for consultation has never been used.”
The councillor was confused. “How are residents (housed and unhoused) supposed to know about the renewal if no one is informed or consulted?” Plante asked. “Furthermore, it’s not indicated on your website that (The Trailer) has reapplied, just the date their licence expires.”
It’s no wonder that the leadership at South Riverdale feels confident that Health Canada will rubber-stamp their forthcoming renewal application in spite of the site’s well-documented failure to communicate with its surrounding community, a local mother’s death and charges being laid against one of the site’s employees for allegedly aiding and abetting one of the shooters in his escape from the scene, as well as obstruction of justice.
Not only that but Public Progress, an outreach firm that South Riverdale hired a year ago to survey the immediate neighbourhood, reported in a meeting with various stakeholders that the more than 230 residents and business owners it spoke to were near unanimous in their feeling that the injection site needed to either move or close.
It seems doubtful that any of this will matter to Health Canada, as it has become Old Reliable for the harm reduction crowd. Are you experiencing murders, drug and weapons busts, criminal charges? Fear not, injection sites, we’ll let you determine how bad things really are. We’ll never ask those suffering from your collateral damage what they think.
South Riverdale is so confident Health Canada will come through for it, that it recently distributed its own online survey, which it intends to use in its renewal application even though the survey makes no mention of the exemption at all. The survey questions have little to do with crime and disorder; it has a distinct “how are you possibly going to get by without us?” vibe.
South Riverdale’s survey elicited a flurry of truth bombs from my neighbours. “(You) have been given ample opportunity to engage with the community in a thoughtful and authentic manner,” one wrote. “So it feels a bit late to be asking all of the same questions again.”
This is a lesson Health Canada has apparently already learned — there is no point in asking questions you don’t want to hear the answers to.
National Post