We were providing the best care possible in Toronto. Doug Ford is wrong to be cutting these programs

Vincent Lam, The Toronto Star
April 18, 2026

magine the captain of a sinking boat saying to passengers, “Would you like a life jacket? Or a spot in a life raft?” Any sensible passenger would reply, “I will take both!” Living with an untreated substance addiction is not unlike being aboard a boat that is taking on water. The boat, or the addiction, becomes heavier, less manoeuvreable, and is at risk of sinking all the way to the ocean floor. In my work as an addiction doctor, the greatest satisfaction is to see someone with an addiction board the life raft: getting treatment, significantly reducing or stopping their substance use, and paddling to dry land, a place of stability. Meanwhile, I see every day that many people who use drugs also need a life-jacket: harm reduction — which includes the provision of clean drug use supplies, public education around the use of naloxone to reverse overdoses, and supervised drug consumption sites. The crux of it is simple: someone who overdoses and dies never gets to treatment. What kind of captain would offer a choice between a life-jacket and a life raft? Yet, the Ford Conservative government is doing even worse. In deciding that it will defund all provincially funded supervised drug consumption sites with 90 days notice, effective June 13, it is saying, “There’s no life preserver. Get in the raft — and if you fall out and drown, tough!”

In 2024, despite well-established scientific evidence around the effectiveness of supervised consumption sites, the Ford Conservative government passed Bill 223, banning such sites within 200 m of schools or child-care centres. This resulted in closure of 15 sites across the province. Many chose to convert to the province’s abstinence-based model, the HART or ‘Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment’ Hub, in which the government is investing $550 million dollars. These are intended to be focused on treatment and recovery, and transitioning people into stable housing, and do not allow any on-site drug consumption. Kensington Market, a site which mounted a Charter challenge and won a court injunction to remain open, reported a 30 per cent increase in visitors mid-2025 after 4 sites closed in Toronto. In the past month, the Ford government has announced that it will defund eight remaining provincially funded supervised consumption sites, including two of the busiest sites in Toronto — the Moss Park and Fred Victor sites. This, despite a Toronto Public Health report urging the provincial government to increase access to supervised consumption sites to prevent overdoses, and warning that closures would reduce access to life-saving clinical services, resulting in “significant risk of increased overdose deaths.”

I visited the Moss Park site recently, which is a few blocks from my addiction treatment clinic, located in what was previously an art gallery space. In the peaceful, quiet consumption room, several men who were drowsy after recently used drugs were monitored by a nurse with oxygen tanks and life-saving medication at hand. Sites like this are expert in overdose reversal. The Moss Park site has reversed 4,328 overdoses since 2018, while province-wide in sites like this, between 2020 and 2024, over 22,000 overdoses were reversed. In addition to saving lives, overdoses that occur in consumption sites decrease the burden on ambulances and already crowded hospital emergency departments. Following the 2025 site closures, between April 2025 and January 2026 there was an 82 per cent increase in suspected overdose calls received by Toronto Paramedic Services.

The sites do much more than reversing overdoses. During my visit to Moss Park, in the room next to the consumption room, a group of clients were painting with acrylics on small canvases — an impromptu art session. In the isolated lives of street-involved people who use drugs, there is immense value in such opportunity for connection and expression. In a clinical room, a nurse cared for individual patients who needed primary care. Like other sites, Moss Park delivers a range of health care services including mental health care and complex wound care to vulnerable people who otherwise have difficulty accessing care. Some sites have offered OAT, opioid agonist therapy, which is the mainstay of the treatment of opioid use disorder. As I chatted with a staff member, someone knocked on the door to ask if any food was available. In the past year, Moss Park provided 5,267 meals to members of the community who do not use the consumption services. Hungry neighbours are not the only people who knock on the door. Staff told me that local police officers have visited to individually express their dismay at the site’s closure, because they understand the sites’ valuable contribution to the local community. I have seen first-hand how the closures of sites has increased street-level disorder: since the 2025 round of site closures, the sidewalk outside my clinic, on a busy downtown street near The Eaton Centre, has become a regular gathering place for people selling and using drugs. This was not the case when more sites were open. Premier Ford says of the sites, “There’s needles all over the place. It’s dangerous for kids and communities. They’re in the parks. It’s terrible, and we’re closing them down.” In fact, it is the closure of sites which has and will result in more drug use-related litter, and more open drug use in public.

Health Minister Sylvia Jones recently said, “We want to ensure that there is a pathway out of addictions, and you can’t do that when you continue to fund, frankly, illicit drugs.” A factual correction: supervised consumption sites do not fund illicit drugs. They provide life-saving care for people who bring their own dangerous drugs to the sites, hence reducing the risk to the user. Beyond this, Minister Jones’ statement expresses the false dichotomy that addiction treatment and harm reduction are mutually exclusive, which this government seems determined to promote. The treatment goals of the HART hubs are laudable — to support people in transitioning from being unhoused into supportive housing while providing comprehensive, low-barrier, recovery-oriented care. The best way to achieve these goals would be to pair these investments with robust ongoing support of harm reduction, building on the hard-earned trust that has been established with marginalized, underserved people. Give people the life-jacket as well as the life raft. They need and deserve both.

The Toronto Star