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The fallout from the announced closure of ten supervised injection sites in Ontario within 200 metres of schools and daycares on Tuesday was as swift as it was predictable.
Ontario premier Doug Ford said the next day he was receiving an “endless” stream of calls from residents and business owners near one of those ten sites slated to close, in the Leslieville neighbourhood of Toronto, where my family lives, to offer profuse gratitude. Meanwhile, harm reduction activists launched into what they do best — calling people who disagree murderers.
These howls of murder and pending death sentences for the vulnerable aimed at the Ford government, which had just made the fateful decision, came from people as wildly diverse as associate professors of social work and the heads of nursing associations.
And it wasn’t just Ford and his health minister, Sylvia Jones, who would be condemned to eternal damnation for supposedly orchestrating mass deaths by overdose. One of my neighbours, controversial Toronto writer/activist Desmond Cole, took time out from his ongoing efforts to free Palestine to hop on X to say “too many of my neighbours,” all of whom thought our site was poorly located, will, by extension, have blood on our hands also.
Amid the accusations of bloodlust hurled at Leslieville parents growing weary of people threatening to burn their house down, rape their children or shoot someone’s mother in cold blood, harm reduction activists were taking a very wide detour around new injection site crime statistics unveiled as part of the health minister’s announcement.
Multiple police departments and Ontario’s solicitor general revealed that those who live close to injection sites report 113 per cent more assaults than neighbourhoods without them, not to mention 76 per cent more break and enters, 40 per cent more shootings, 97 per cent more robberies and 45 per cent more shootings.
While looking for something — anything — with which to splatter more blood on our provincial government, the CBC ran a story on Wednesday about how two reviews the Ontario Ministry of Health had commissioned last fall into the site I live across the street from, the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, had been “quietly posted online” the day of the health minister’s big announcement.
The juicy hook in this story was that even though both reports recommended that the injection site in Leslieville remain open, albeit with a few recommended tweaks, the Ford government had dared to ignore the “expert” advice of dedicated health care professionals. Mike Crawley, who covers Ontario provincial politics for the CBC, called the story a SCOOP (why is this always capitalized?), even though I had reported this very set of facts the night before in the Post.
When I first read the reports, both of which I had participated in to some extent, the word SCOOP wasn’t what jumped to mind. I believe my initial thought was WAIT, THIS CAN’T BE. Followed by: IS THIS A JOKE? Then, at the end: WHERE’S THE REST?
The main review into the South Riverdale site was conducted by Unity Health Toronto, a hospital network. From the very beginning, this review had been positioned by the ministry of health as a “critical incident report,” something that typically emanates from an “unintended event” inside a health care facility that results in death, disability or harm to a patient. In this case, weirdly, it was going to refer to a local mother of two named Karolina Huebner-Makurat who was fatally shot when two drug dealers outside the site allegedly tried to rob a third dealer and guns were drawn on July 7, 2023.
Most of my neighbours were sufficiently immersed in the breathtaking mismanagement of the South Riverdale site to be concerned when Unity Health was chosen to conduct the third-party review in October. A branch of Unity Health, MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, was instrumental in conducting the research that laid the foundation for the first supervised injection sites to open in Toronto in 2017. We’d expected something a little more arm’s length.
We also expected any review to provide a deep dive into the currently unknown details about the death of Huebner-Makurat — the critical incident in question. What was the relationship, if any, between the centre and the alleged shooters? Why was one of the alleged shooters seen entering South Riverdale the day of the shooting? Had the site’s employees expressed concerns about drug dealers outside the site?
In layman’s terms, we wanted answers. We were sorely disappointed. One of the injection site employees, Khalila Mohammed, was charged a little more than a month after Huebner-Makurat’s death with aiding and abetting one of the alleged shooters. Guess what? Mohammed’s name is nowhere to be found in any of the reports.
Those most impacted by the site’s unintended but foreseeable consequences also expected the report to provide some kind of explanation for why leadership of the site ignored the many safety concerns of its neighbours, concerns that stretched back years prior to the shooting. Why was the site’s relationship with police “broken,” according to the local superintendent after the shooting? Beyond answers, we naively hoped some form of accountability would present itself.
Instead, the Unity Health report authors, including Dr. Ahmed Bayoumi, the godfather of supervised injection in Toronto, produced what one of my neighbours accurately calls a “community satisfaction survey as filtered through the self-styled lens of public health.”
Even the report by Jill Campbell, the provincially appointed supervisor who oversaw the site for six months was, from an accountability standpoint, a monumental disappointment (except for the part in which she disclosed that when harm reduction employees use the word “community,” they mean drug users and clients only). I met with Campbell, both virtually and in person, a handful of times between December and April. Campbell openly acknowledged to me and other neighbours the mismanagement of the centre and the profound mistrust it created with the surrounding community.
Her report, however, begins by wondering aloud how marginalized people are going to pay for coffee at the café across the street from the site that doesn’t accept cash (partly as a result of rampant drug-fuelled theft), quotes Mahatma Gandhi and chides residents with security cameras for violating some vague city privacy bylaw because they’d sent site management photographs of clients buying and using drugs on South Riverdale property, never acknowledging that homicide detectives used footage from these same security cameras to identify the wanted shooters.
Just days before I met Campbell for the first time in December, the National Post had published a feature-length story by Tara Riley, a harm reduction employee at South Riverdale for six years. Riley’s account included stunning revelations: that drug dealers had quickly wormed their way inside the site after it first opened to sell to clients from the comfort of the injection site booths and that staff with “lived experience” regularly used drugs and sometimes overdosed at work. Even though Campbell met with Riley in person, Riley’s name and shocking allegations are nowhere to be found in Campbell’s report to the ministry.
While Campbell bizarrely framed our neighbourhood’s criticisms of the site as a communications shortcoming above all else, the same cannot be said for Unity’s Health’s Community Engagement Report, a companion document to the main review. Here, Unity Health had no choice but to concede that “most respondents felt strongly that the (site) should be closed or moved to a different location.”
Without alerting readers to its own self-interest in the continued existence of the very sites for which it planted and watered the seeds years ago, Unity Health clarified that this, my neighbourhood’s most desired change, conveniently quarantined in a separate document, would not be included in the recommendations of its main report. No wonder Doug Ford took a pass.
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