Premier Doug Ford, health minister defend supervised consumption site closures

Ontario’s Ford government says it will end funding for supervised consumption sites, shifting resources toward addiction treatment and recovery programs.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his health minister said Wednesday they will not reverse course on their decision to shutter more supervised drug consumption sites, after a letter from six former Toronto mayors criticized the move to defund the sites.

Two weeks ago, the province notified seven supervised consumption sites that it would be pulling their funding, with sites set to close by mid-June. This came after the province forced the closure of nine other such sites last year that it deemed were too close to schools and daycares.

“I want to help these people, but I’m not going to sit back as you put these injection sites in the middle of communities,” Ford said at an unrelated news conference Wednesday.

“There’s needles all over the place. It’s dangerous for kids and communities. They’re in the parks. It’s terrible, and we’re closing them down.”

Health Minister Sylvia Jones was adamant the government will not change course as it moves to an abstinence-based model known as homelessness and addiction recovery treatment, or HART, hubs.

“We’re not going to reverse, we’ve been very clear: our focus is on the HART hubs to make sure that people have access to treatment,” Jones said. 

“We want to ensure that there is a pathway out of addictions, and you can’t do that when you continue to fund, frankly, illicit drugs.”

The province has funded 28 new hubs with all but one now operational, Jones said.

Health-care workers, advocates and homeless people have decried the closures and said they will lead to more deaths.

Former Toronto mayors urge Ford to reverse course

Mayor Olivia Chow has long supported “a range of evidence-based options to address the overdose and addictions crisis, including harm reduction, treatment and prevention, recognizing that no single approach will work on its own,” her office said.

“She believes decisions must be guided by public health evidence and ensure that people continue to have access to a full spectrum of life-saving support,” said Braman Thillainathan, Chow’s spokesman.

The mayor is calling for sustained funding for treatment and supportive housing and for better co-ordination from the federal and provincial governments to deal with the overdose crisis.

Six former mayors of Toronto wrote to Ford and Jones on Tuesday, urging them to change their minds.

“These decisions to close sites, which provide integrated health and social services as well as facilities to test drug supply, have caused much physical harm and death and have resulted in increased public expenditures, without resulting in any positive impacts,” wrote former mayors David Crombie, Art Eggleton, Barbara Hall, David Miller, John Sewell and John Tory.

The former mayors pointed to an increase in non-fatal opioid overdose calls received by Toronto Paramedic Services. 

The data show an 82 per cent increase in suspected opioid overdose calls between April 1, 2025, when those nine other sites closed, and January 2026. There were 160 such calls in April last year and 350 this past January.

That’s a reversal of the downward trend in non-fatal opioid overdose calls that the province had been seeing between 2023 and early 2025.

Fatal opioid overdoses have also generally fallen year over year since reaching a high during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2021, the mortality rate for opioid toxicity hit its high point with 19.4 deaths per 100,000 people, which was more than double the rate of 9.1 deaths in 2017.

By 2025, the mortality rate had dropped by half from the pandemic high, with a rate of 8.5 deaths per 100,000 people.

Yet more than 2,200 Ontarians died by opioids in 2024, the latest full year of data available, down from more than 2,600 who died from those drugs in 2023.

Fentanyl and related substances are a factor in the vast majority of drug overdose deaths in Ontario.

The latest data from the Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario show there were 206 suspected drug-related deaths across the province in February of this year compared to 209 in February 2025, though the recent data remains preliminary.

The Liberals said there is a place for supervised consumption sites if they are attached to hospitals or community clinics. 

“I think that we want to see a system of care in place for people with addictions, and this is a part of it. Harm reduction is an evidence-based approach,” said Lee Fairclough, the Liberal mental health critic and a former health-care worker who later worked as an executive at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

NDP Leader Marit Stiles said the decision to close supervised consumption sites has created a problem.

“The minister of health and any government decision should be led by empathy and evidence, and unfortunately this decision does not seem to be following that at all,” she said. 

“I would also add that taking away supports and programs without replacing them with anything else comparable is a real problem.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 25, 2026.

Liam Casey, The Canadian Press