Harm reductionists struggle to accept that they’re losing Ontario
The Ford government is closing supervised injection sites near schools despite the cries of activists
A week after the Doug Ford government announced the closure of 10 supervised injection sites in Ontario within 200 metres of schools, harm reduction activists had moved on from denial and were well into the second Kubler-Ross stage of accepting the dire news — anger.
The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which represents many of the staff members at the five Toronto injection sites set to close by the end of March 2025, organized a press conference Monday to express their collective rage.
The first speaker was Zoe Dodd, a harm reduction activist at the centre of a controversy in late May, when audio of a meeting she’d participated in was leaked to the National Post’s Adam Zivo. Dodd had proposed disrupting a meeting of addiction recovery doctors by filling up a fire extinguisher with paint to “just spray them all.”
At Monday’s press conference, Dodd’s anger was not just directed at the Ford government. She also targeted “a few vocal critics” who, supposedly, “will not be satisfied until (the sites) are closed.” These include parents who are walking children through war zones to get to daycare, and at least two business owners who’ve suffered $100,000 in theft and damages. One Toronto injection site has even admitted that these losses are directly related to its presence nearby.
One of the reporters in attendance asked the assembled CUPE members about the government’s concern for the safety of those who live and work around injection sites, to which Dodd replied, in part, “We need to talk about, what is safety? Is safety a feeling?” She said this one year after a local mother was allegedly shot to death by feuding drug dealers drawn to the injection site in Toronto’s South Riverdale neighbourhood — across the street from where I live — which is pretty much all you need to know.
