August 7 2024
The Honourable Sylvia Jones
Ministry of Health
[email protected] | [email protected]
777 Bay Street, 5th Floor
Toronto, ON M7A 2J3
The Honourable Michael Tibollo
Ministry of Health
[email protected] | [email protected]
7 Queen’s Park Crescent
Toronto, ON M7A 1Y7
Dear Minister Jones and Associate Minister Tibollo,
RE: Supervised Consumption Services site closures due to lack of funding from Ministry of Health
This is a follow up to our letter dated March 4 2024 regarding the need to implement emergency funding for supervised consumption services, to which we have received no response. Ontario’s drug poisoning death rate – now approximately one Ontario resident dying every 2 ½ hours – is dire.
We reiterate our urgent request that the Ministry of Health provide immediate funding for supervised consumption services (SCS) in Ontario, and to act collaboratively and with transparency to deliver life-saving services for existing and future applications for SCS under the provincial Consumption and Treatment Services (CTS) model. We urge the Ontario government to respect the needs of local municipalities, end the deadly and discriminatory delays, and provide relief for emergency responders in establishing evidence-based health and social supports via SCS.
While treatment and recovery options must be made available to all who wish to access these services, it is paramount that a spectrum of harm reduction services and other health and social supports are immediately scaled up. We remind the government that hundreds of people have died who were not diagnosed with a substance use disorder and would not have been eligible for addiction treatment services. The Ontario government’s ongoing delays further entrenches stigma and discrimination while contributing to needless and preventable deaths, injuries, grief and trauma.
Tragically, since our previous letter, supervised consumption services sites in Timmins and Sudbury, where applications have been awaiting a response from the province for 16 months (Timmins) and 33 months (Sudbury), have been forced to shut their doors in June 2024 and March 2024 respectively, along with the Windsor site (application submitted 21 months ago) which was forced to shut down in December 2023, leaving an increasing number of local communities without the necessary services to prevent overdose-related death. In Barrie, applicants have been forced to rescind their application submitted two and a half years ago due to the unsustainability of maintaining rental payments for a location without having any confirmation of funding nor timelines from your government. It is unacceptable that the provincial government is acting as the central roadblock in establishing urgently needed life-saving services, despite local support and significant local investment into these services that will all go to waste.
The 2023 annual report of the Chief Medical Officer of Health recommended that Ontario increase access to harm reduction services, like supervised consumption services, as part of a fulsome response. The Association of Municipalities of Ontario, the Association of Local Public Health Agencies, and Addictions and Mental Health Ontario are among the many, many organizations urging immediate action establishing new SCS sites. Data shows that there were an estimated 3,812 drug-related deaths in 2023, and an additional 1,842 suspected-drug toxicity deaths in the first six months of 2024. In Timmins, Windsor and Sudbury, the opioid toxicity mortality rate is nearly three times the provincial average. There is a dearth of supervised consumption services in northern Ontario contributing to service inequities between the north and south.
This crisis has worsened under the current provincial government, with deaths totaling more than 21,000 Ontario residents since 2018. Given the inordinate delays and lack of transparency in providing timely funding for simple, life-saving services, we are concerned about this government’s unwillingness to adequately implement a successful holistic and comprehensive provincial drug strategy.
We reiterate our calls to:
- Immediately provide direct emergency funding to supervised consumption services (SCS) sites that have submitted their Consumption and Treatment Services (CTS) applications to the province and have closed due to lack of provincial funding.
- Urgently provide, improve, and sustain uninterrupted provincial funding for SCS, including inhalation, and ensure equity in regional service availability, particularly in northern communities.
- Phase out the Consumption and Treatment Services (CTS) approach to funding SCS, which requires additional and overly stringent conditions over and above Health Canada’s requirements.
- In the interim, immediately remove the cap on the number of funded SCS sites and the prohibition on inhalation services under the provincial CTS model.
- In the interim, introduce transparency and an expedited 30-day timeline for responding to applications under the provincial CTS model.
- Introduce a low-barrier process by which community organizations can seek provincial funding for SCS.
- Integrate SCS into Ontario’s core funded healthcare system with ongoing, integrated funding and resources.
- Meet with us by September 13.
Signed by,
DJ Larkin, Executive Director, Canadian Drug Policy Coalition
Heidi Eisenhauer, Executive Director, Réseau ACCESS Network
Janet Butler-McPhee & Sandra Ka Hon Chu, Co-Executive Directors, HIV Legal
Network
Dr. Julie Samson, Co-Lead of the addiction medicine consult service, Timmins and
District Hospital
Michael Brennan, Executive Director, Pozitive Pathways Community Service
Michael Parkinson, Coordinator, Drug Strategy Network of Ontario
