Two people were ejected from the observation gallery of the provincial legislature at Queen’s Park Tuesday following a heated demonstration over the closure of supervised consumption sites by the Ford government.
“I work in a safe consumption site. I see one to two people overdose every day and we save lives. There’s blood on your hands!” a man in a track suit yelled from the gallery as MPPs debated the Ford government’s new legislation.
He was then led away by security.
A short time later another man was also led out of the gallery by security after yelling at legislators over the closures.
The Ford government tabled a bill Monday that would close 10 supervised consumption sites, including five in Toronto. The province said the sites are too close to schools and daycares and cited incidents such as the fatal shooting of Toronto mother Karolina Huebner-Makurat near a supervised consumption site as evidence that they are harmful for the community.
The demonstration came as Associate Minister for Mental Health and Addictions Michael Tibollo was defending the government’s move in the legislature.
“The focus of this government has been and will continue to be to build a treatment and recovery model that ensures that everyone in need of help in the province will get the help when and where they need it,” Tibollo said.
He said that means “opportunities for individuals to get the help they need from the beginning, which is detox and withdrawal management to treatment, and then supporting them to transition back in.”
Supervised consumption sites have offered people a place to use drugs with clean equipment, with health professionals on-hand to offer information about treatment for addiction, as well as care if someone should overdose.
Harm reduction workers have decried the government’s changes and said that the closures will cost lives, as people who use drugs will be driven to do so under less safe conditions, increasing the likelihood of overdose deaths and the spread of diseases through unclean needles.
Whereas municipalities previously had the ability to apply directly to the federal government for legal exemptions that would allow safe consumption sites, the new bill requires them to get provincial approval to do so.
Health Minister Sylvia Jones said Monday that the legislation effectively means “there will be no further safe injection sites in the province of Ontario under our government.”
The province has said that it will instead be investing in 19 new “homelessness and addiction recovery treatment hubs” (HART hubs), which will open by March to coincide with closure of the supervised consumption sites.
“Obviously people are very concerned,” Opposition Leader Marit Stiles told reporters following the session. “I don’t know who those protesters were, but I know that people on the front line in particular are very concerned about what this is going to mean; lives being lost.”
Without dedicated spaces for consuming drugs, Stiles said, people will end up using them “back in the laneways, behind your schools, in your parks.”
She said she doesn’t see how the bill will stop people from doing drugs.
“I’m not sure this is going to solve the problem the way the government thinks it will.”
With files from The Canadian Press