Nine drug of 10 consumption and treatment services (CTS) sites targeted for closure by Tuesday will shut down, despite a court injunction granting them a reprieve.
Staff members confirmed the April 1 closures of CTS sites at the Guelph Community Health Centre, Thunder Bay's NorWest Community Health Centre, Toronto's Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre (Bathurst location) and Toronto's Regent Park Community Health Centre. Toronto Public Health's downtown The Works site says it will close on Tuesday.
The Region of Waterloo Public Health and Emergency Services site in Kitchener is set to close on Tuesday, according to the Waterloo Region Drug Action Team; as is the Hamilton Urban Core Community Health Centre's site, per Hamilton's Substance Overdose Prevention & Education Network.
Ottawa's Somerset West Community Health Centre and the South Riverdale Community Health Centre in Toronto have already closed.
Toronto's Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site, which is within 200 metres of a child-care centre but does not receive provincial funding, will remain open.
Other sites in Toronto, Kingston, London, Ottawa, Peterborough and St. Catharines will remain open as they are more than 200 metres away from a school or child-care centre.
Rather than shut down entirely, several of the sites set to close accepted the province's offer to transform into abstinence-based HART hubs, allowing them to continue to help clients access health care and treatment while discontinuing harm reduction services.
After the injunction was granted last week, Health Minister Sylvia Jones' office said the HART hub transition would "proceed as planned on April 1st."
"Provincial funding for HART Hubs cannot be used for drug injection services and will be contingent on the organization not seeking to continue those services," spokesperson Hannah Jensen said in an email.
The threat of the province pulling back its HART hub funding "looms large, very large, across all affected CTS sites," the Waterloo Region Drug Action Team said in an email, adding that municipalities can't fund CTS sites without provincial permission.
The Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario (RNAO), which intervened in the Charter challenge case from which the injunction stems, urged the Ford government to reconsider its decision.
“You do not help people by removing essential health services from them. Nurses have long said that the rights of people struggling with substance use have been ignored in the government’s handling of this file. SCS sites save lives and provide evidence-based care, primary care and comprehensive mental health support,” RNAO president Lhamo Dolkar said in a release.
Toronto harm reduction worker Zoë Dodd decried what she said is a lack of planning to deal with the increased deaths that closing SCS sites will cause.
"We know what the outcomes will be. We already have examples of it that everyone wants to ignore. I have zero idea what the plan is," she said.
While she declined to discuss specifics, Dodd said her group, the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society, still has some money and is discussing next steps around harm reduction in the city.
