Province orders Guelph's supervised consumption site closed by March

'Make no mistake – Ontario will lose more lives because of this government’s attack on harm reduction services,' says MPP Mike Schreiner

Ontario Minister of Health, Sylvia Jones during her remarks at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference in Ottawa on Tuesday afternoon.

Mayor Cam Guthrie is confident the province’s new model for addiction recovery will show positive results cities have been seeking.

The province formally announced Tuesday afternoon that nine provincially-funded consumption sites and one self-funded site will have to stop providing certain services, namely supervised safe consumption, safe supply and needle exchange, by the end of March.

The Guelph Community Health Centre’s Consumption and Treatment Services (CTS) site at 176 Wyndham St. is one of those affected because it is within 200 metres of a daycare or school.

The government will instead put $378 million toward 19 new Homelessness and Addiction Recovery (HART) Hubs, said Sylvia Jones, Ontario Minister of Health in her remarks at  Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference in Ottawa.

The Guelph Community Health Centre is eligible to apply to be one of those hubs, which will focus on offering a variety of services aimed at recovery.

"I commend the provincial government for moving forward with a detailed plan to save lives, restore families and improve communities struggling with the stranglehold of addictions. I am confident that the new HART Hub model, focused on recovery, will show the positive results cities have been desperately requesting for our most vulnerable citizens, not just in Guelph, but across Ontario,” said Guthrie in a press release.

The mayor later posted on social media that he was now focusing his energy "on doing whatever it takes to review the criteria on an application to obtain part of the $378 million funding for a HART HUB in our community."

The province is banning consumption sites located within a 200 metre zone of schools or childcare centres.

The nine sites will be given the opportunity to transition into a HART Hub “and will be prioritized as part of the application process,” said Jones.

The applications close October this year, she said during a media question and answer period. 

“Our first priority must always be protecting our communities, especially when it comes to some of our most innocent and vulnerable - our children,” said Jones, in her speech.

Asked during a subsequent question period if people are going to die because of this move, given the number of overdoses trained staff respond to at the sites, Jones responded: "People are not going to die. They're going to get access to services."

The HART hubs aim to provide treatment including primary care, mental health and addictions care, social services, employment support, increased availability for shelter beds and supportive housing and other supplies and services like Naloxone, showers and food, she said.

“I want to be clear, they will not provide safe supply, supervised drug consumption or needle exchange programs,” said Jones. 

Guelph MPP Mike Schreiner slammed the move.

“Make no mistake – Ontario will lose more lives because of this government’s attack on harm reduction services," said Schreiner.

Closing supervised consumption and treatment sites is not going to decrease drug use because providing care for substance users is not an either-or scenario. Ontario needs supervised consumption and treatment sites and it needs supportive housing and it needs accessible treatment options for people in addictions recovery, Schreiner said in a release.

"This decision is going to lead to more drug poisonings, more infectious disease spread and more people with one less pathway to judgment-free social services and addictions recovery treatment."

The Guelph CHC CTS site launched in 2019. 

It started an overdose prevention site in 2018 as a temporary response to the city’s opioid crisis, according to a community consultation from 2019.

Guelph CHC, the Guelph Family Health Team and ARCH applied to the ministry of long-term care so it could offer CTS long-term. The application was successful. 

Now, it has just over seven months to stop offering some of its key services.