The Ontario government recently said it will cut provincial funding for seven supervised drug consumption sites in Toronto, Ottawa, Niagara, Peterborough and London, with 90 days given to wind down their operations.
In their place, the province is spending $378 million on 19 Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) hubs, which explicitly exclude supervised consumption and needle exchange services.
While Premier Doug Ford’s government’s framing of supervised consumption as a “failed experiment” is selective, it’s not baseless in the way that defenders of these sites sometimes imply.
