According to various media reports, the province is set to unveil new restrictions that will close the book on a safe consumption site at 150 Main St. in Cambridge and spell the end for as many as 10 existing safe consumption sites including the one in Kitchener.
The Toronto Sun was the first to report that Ontario Minister of Health Sylvia Jones, will be announcing the pending closures during a speech at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) conference in Ottawa this afternoon.
Consumption and treatment services sites (CTS) within 200 metres of schools or childcare facilities will be banned and existing ones that meet that restriction will be closed no later than March 31, 2025, said the Sun.
The Toronto Star also reported on the closures.
In its reporting on the closure of what it called "drug dens," the Toronto Sun also reported the province will announce $378 million for “Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) Hubs” at 19 locations throughout the province. It says they will create 375 “highly supportive housing units” as well as addiction recovery and treatment beds.
The province launched a "critical incident review" of South Riverdale Community Health Centre in east-end Toronto last summer after a passerby, 44-year-old Karolina Huebner-Makurat, was killed by a stray bullet from a fight that broke out in the area around the site.
That review put many pending sites in limbo and appears to have resulted in the decision by the province to go another direction.
Julie Kalbfleisch, communications manager for Sanguen, the organization that runs the Kitchener CTS site expressed shock when she was informed about the rumoured closures during a call with CambridgeToday this morning.
"I think if these reports are true and it does close, I can tell you that it will be very bad," said Kalbfleisch. "Unfortunately there are going to be people that die preventable deaths because of this."
She said the Kitchener CTS has seen over 50,000 visits since opening in 2019 and experienced 1,031 overdoses, reversing every single one.
"There hasn't been one death here. These sites literally save lives," she added.
The new restrictions would mean the end for the Kitchener CTS site that is located at 150 Duke St. only 50 metres away from the nearest childcare site at the YMCA, 111 Duke St. W.
It would also mean the end of the region's and city's plan to bring a CTS to 150 Main St. in Cambridge, which is steps away from Central Public School.
Kalbfleisch noted there is still not a lot of information available to them and what this announcement will mean for the organization, but maintains that these sites are vital to the role of providing help and support to some of the most vulnerable people in the community.
"The truth is it's just such a barrier to health when you have elected officials who don't listen to the evidence and don't listen to the experts," she said.
"We're not going to get out of this by doing these knee-jerk reactions. These sites are not a tent on the corner, this is a beautiful clinic with all these wraparound services and a lot of data to support the work that's done there."
Cambridge Ward 7 councillor, Scott Hamilton thinks this decision is a sad development amidst a worsening crisis.
"There is a clear and urgent need to do something about the current drug poisoning crisis and the CTS isn't a silver bullet, but experts agree that this is the best we got to save lives," he said.
Hamilton has been a supporter of a CTS site coming to Cambridge since he toured the Kitchener facility back in 2021. What he saw there only galvanized his support and made the decision to push for a Cambridge location a "no brainer."
"When I went to Kitchener I didn't tell anyone I was going I just kinda showed up. I wanted to get the real deal and see what it's like first hand," he recalled. "Everyone has their own perception of what a safe consumption site looks like, but when I saw the Kitchener location it was very eye-opening."
The community that had been built in a short time at the facility was something that Hamilton knew would be beneficial to Cambridge.
He recalled speaking to a young women who was about to use at the facility and she noted that she wanted to get clean and this was the only place she could go to that made her feel like a human.
"She told me sometimes she would go to the CTS site not even to use but just to be in the presence of others that understood what she was going through and then understood it was a place where she could feel safe and get help," he said.
With the closure of the Kitchener location, Hamilton thinks this might be the final nail in the coffin for any chance of Cambridge getting their own site.
He added that this decision is leading the province in the wrong direction and elected officials need to be following the guidance of experts and doctors rather than public opinion and personal ideologies.
"At Cambridge council, we are not experts in this (drug crisis) whatsoever; we are part-time politicians. Our job is to listen to our local experts that know what they're talking about and spend their lives dealing with these issues and that's exactly what I'm going to do after this decision," said Hamilton.
