Province says it will close 10 supervised consumption sites and ban new ones in favour of 'hub' model aimed at combating homelessness and addiction
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
The hubs will add up to 375 "highly supportive housing units," according to a government release, and aim to connect people to services including mental health treatment, primary care, employment help and other supports. The following CTS sites will have to shut down by March 31, 2025. All except the Kensington Market location are funded by the province.
Sites will also have to report regularly to the province on client numbers; create anti-loitering and "service restriction" policies; and work with police to do a security assessment every three years. Ford started a review of supervised consumption sites last year after a shooting death near one in Toronto. As they waited for approval, sites in Barrie, Timmins and Sudbury that were approved by local leaders and the federal government were forced to close. Sault Ste. Marie's mayor had also hoped to open one.
“Nurses are enraged that we will see more preventable deaths. These numbers will increase because the Ford government has made it clear that people who use substances are disposable,” RNAO president and nurse practitioner Lhamo Dolkar said in a release. Without supervised consumption sites, drug users may be "forced" to use them in public, making the issue more visible, Kolla said.
"It tends to be one of those things that gets announced in a good news announcement, and then never actually turns into anything on the ground," Kolla said.To get into residential treatment, you must have detoxed, she said. Someone in Toronto might do so at CAMH, one of the small handful of detox sites in the province with medical staff on hand, she said. But after 10–12 days, that person will be released to wait for six to 12 months for a treatment bed.And that's in Toronto.
"And then people are told that they're failures because they don't do well in these programs. But actually, the programs haven't changed. They're quite archaic and built off a model that was created in 1950s," Dodd said. "And importantly, we know it increases the likelihood of them connecting with other services when they want it."
AMO President Colin Best welcomed the hub funding, but said in a release that CTS sites "are a critical part of tackling the opioid crisis.
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