Ford government deadly closure of safe consumption sites spells disaster for Ontario's overdose epidemic: "Safe supply saves lives - this decision will result in countless unnecessary deaths."

TORONTO, Aug. 21, 2024 /CNW/ - In a stunning display of contempt for real community safety, the Ford government announced yesterday the closure of ten safe consumption sites (SCS) across Ontario that provide life-saving services, including overdose prevention, in Guelph, Kitchener, Hamilton, Thunder Bay, and Toronto.

Even as frontline workers at these community pillars fight to glean more information from the province regarding potential lay-offs, it is the tens of thousands of lives lost to a province-wide drug poisoning epidemic that are front of mind. This violent directive will lead to countless preventable deaths.

The announcement came on behalf of the Ford government from Minister Sylvia Jones at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) in Ottawa, leveraging new zoning legislature that will lead to SCS closures across the province.

"Safe supply saves lives – this decision will result in countless unnecessary deaths," said Kirsty Millwood, President of OPSEU/SEFPO Local 5115, a composite local representing workers at Regent Park Community Health Centre. "It is unconscionable to cut life-saving services in the midst of a health care crisis that has taken over 45,000 lives across the country in the last decade, and thousands more in the last year alone."

"Closing safe consumption sites will not make substances disappear from our communities," added Millwood. "But it will leave people more likely to use alone and overdose during a worsening toxic drug poisoning epidemic."

The announced closures come only months after 51 community groups – including leading harm reduction, community health care, and drug policy organizations – called upon Ford's government to immediately fund and support supervised consumption services amidst the worsening toxic drug crisis.

Yesterday's decision to package the announcement of closures of safe consumption sites along with the introduction of "Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) Hubs" fundamentally misunderstands the nature of support offered at safe consumption sites – what workers champion as the "gateway to appropriate health care."

"These 'treatment hubs' are a failed attempt to reinvent the wheel – sites with Consumption and Treatment Services (CTS) already integrate holistic support for substance users and connect people with showers, treatment referrals, counselling, and more," said Tannice Fletcher-Stackhouse, a nurse practitioner and President of OPSEU/SEFPO Local 744, representing over 130 frontline workers at NorWest Community Health Centre in Thunder Bay. "We've diverted hundreds of patients away from already over-loaded emergency rooms that are unequipped to provide the comprehensive, destigmatized, longer-term care we provide in-house."

Fletcher-Stackhouse says that staff at her local NorWest Community Health Centre – one of the sites affected in the announcement – that come to this work through lived experience are bracing for impact, anticipating the deaths that will fall on the province's hands.

"What these new facilities will do is further fragment care and make it harder for people to get the specific support they need, when they need it," added Fletcher-Stackhouse. "Our detox beds are chronically full – yet all of a sudden, we're going to have 19 new hubs up and running by March 2025 that can meet service user needs? This is an expensive mistake that will cost the province in millions of dollars and countless, preventable deaths."

A recent study published earlier this year found a substantive 67 per cent reduction in overdose deaths in Toronto neighbourhoods within 500 meters of supervised consumption sites after their opening.

"Harm reduction workers have been on the frontline of this crisis for years – and we've seen firsthand that where the provincial government has failed to enact lasting solutions, our work in safe consumption sites has made a profound difference," said Millwood. "To see the province now weaponize the language of 'public safety' while disregarding subject experts in harm reduction, drug policy, and health care through such a deadly policy directive is indefensible."

"Community hubs with overdose prevention on-site are being framed by Conservative politicians as a 'safety' issue – but whose safety is really being weighed when we say that?" asked JP Hornick, President of OPSEU/SEFPO. "Are we considering the 7,444 lives saved at provincially funded supervised consumption sites since 2017?"

"These are empirically-driven health interventions proven to save lives," added Hornick. "We are grieving too many names to be making anti-science policy decisions which add to that list – and there is no universe in which shuttering safe consumption sites does not lead to that list growing."

SOURCE Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU)

For more information, contact: Vic Wojciechowska, OPSEU/SEFPO Communications, [phone], [email protected]