Province halting safe consumption site applications 'despicable': Mayor

Sault Ste. Marie’s mayor has strong words for the province’s plans to reevaluate safety protocols at supervised consumption sites, just as the city’s plans are getting closer to being finalized.

The re-evaluation plans by the province were put in place in response to a shooting this summer outside one such site in Toronto.

As a result, some applications for new sites will be put on hold, said Michael Tibollo, Ontario’s associate minister of mental health and addictions. Some of those applications have been waiting up to two years for approval.

Responding to that news, Matthew Shoemaker told SooToday the province's decision will likely affect the eventual application for a Sault Ste. Marie site.

“It’s a despicable decision that will cost lives across the province,” Shoemaker said on Friday.

Shoemaker said the province has essentially moved the goalposts that define what a supervised consumption site should look like in order to receive approval.

”Until the province comes out with new criteria for consumption and treatment sites, we will likely only be able to go so far in our planning process then be at a standstill until new criteria is set by the province,” he said.

A made-in-Sault Ste. Marie plan for a safe consumption and treatment site is being coordinated by the office of city CAO Malcolm White.

White told SooToday on Friday the decision to reevaluate — and how quickly the province can develop new protocols — will affect the progress of the local plan.

“However there is still a certain amount of work, planning and community engagement that we can complete in the intervening time,” said White.

An update report to city council is expected on the issue for the Oct. 30 meeting, said White.

In a recent sit-down interview in our SooToday studio, Shoemaker said part of the decision-making process in the Sault will revolve around whether to fund a safe consumption site with municipal tax dollars or wait for the province to commit to the project.

“We are not in the health care game, we don’t have the tax base that is required to fund health care,” said Shoemaker, in the video interview.

Shoemaker has said an eventual site should be located in the city's downtown, but not on Queen Street.

Neighbouring municipalities of Timmins and Sudbury each launched a safe consumption site with hopes the province would eventually kick in funding toward them. So far that has not happened and both sites are at risk of closing.

“They have had it open and what do you do? Do you close it because you haven’t received provincial funding,” said Shoemaker in the video interview. 

The province launched a "critical incident review" of South Riverdale Community Health Centre in east-end Toronto after a passerby, 44-year-old Karolina Huebner-Makurat, was killed by a stray bullet from a fight that broke out in the area around the site in July. 

At Queen's Park on Thursday, Minister Tibollo said the province's review will determine what protocols should be in place for all of the province's 17 consumption and treatment sites and the province does not want to open additional sites until the new protocols are in place.

"The protocol has to be put in place because we recognize the problem with what happened at Leslieville, and we don't want to be precipitous and open something that could potentially lead to that issue being repeated elsewhere," he said.

— with files from The Trillium