It was a beautiful day in Kitchener. The Southwestern Ontario city of 300,000 was enjoying a welcome spell of summery weather. Sunlight glinted off the windows of the condo towers that have shot up in recent years, a by-product of the region’s tech boom. Students in shorts and sunglasses walked in laughing groups along King Street, the gentrifying main drag.
But when I visited earlier this month, I didn’t have to look far to see signs of Kitchener’s not-so-hidden crisis. On one corner, a middle-aged woman was talking to a brick wall. A block away, a skinny young man slumped against a building with a crack pipe in his hand.
A year ago, I visited the city to write about the impending closing of its supervised drug-use site, a place where people could use their drugs with attendants on hand to help if they overdosed. Accompanied by a photographer, I spent a day talking to worried staff and clients. They wondered: What would happen once the doors closed?
Graffiti at the Victoria Street encampment highlights the dire state of the homelessness crisis in the Southwestern Ontario city.
Now I was back in town to see. I found a mix of good news and bad. Overdose rates have fallen and services for people suffering from addiction and homelessness have expanded, but potent new drugs are circulating and the impact of Canada’s decade-old opioids crisis is still painfully visible.
My first stop was at the city’s biggest homeless encampment, a squalid collection of tents, tarps, busted sofas, firepits and trash. It stands across the street from the train station where commuters go for the 100-kilometre trip into Toronto. Kitchener has been trying to clear the encampment so that it can build a new transit hub, but the effort has been tied up in the courts.
Mallary Tarrant, 38, says that since the supervised drug-use site closed, she has seen more people sharing needles.
I met Mallary Tarrant, 38, as she was sorting through a bag of clothing that a good Samaritan had dropped off. Ms. Tarrant needed something dry to wear because it had rained overnight; she had ended up huddling in a smelly portable toilet to escape the downpour.
It was a shame the government had forced the supervised drug-use site to close, she said. For her, “it was really a help.” She would go there to have her drugs tested and to get sterile drug-use equipment. Since it closed, she’s seen more people sharing needles, a practice that can spread disease.
Shawna Aldridge, 29, says Kitchener does not have enough programs to help drug users get sober.
Another woman going through the dry clothes had a different view. Shawna Aldridge, 29, said it was a mistake to open the site in the first place, and what drug users need instead is a way to get sober. Kitchener, she said, does not have enough programs to help them. “We can’t get better if there’s no rehabs.”
The city’s supervised site was one of 10 the province ordered to shut because they were near daycares or schools. Last month, Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced the government will also stop funding seven remaining sites, regardless of their locations.
Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford has said such sites “encourage people” to use drugs and leave streets strewn with needles. His government is shifting to a different approach, opening a network of “recovery-focused” hubs in communities around the province. Kitchener is one of them.
Sixty-five people work with the region’s homelessness and addiction recovery treatment (or HART) hub, doing everything from picking up needles to providing mental-health support. Instead of running the HART programs under a single roof, the Waterloo region decided to work with existing groups to provide expanded services. One such program, launched in March, has 12 transitional-housing beds for those trying to make their way to more permanent living arrangements.
Regional officials said that, to protect the privacy of clients, they could not show me any of those services. Nor did they make those in charge available for an interview.
Leaving the encampment, I went across the street to a new facility devoted to helping those who live on Kitchener’s streets.
Run by a non-profit group called the Working Centre, it features a medical centre and offers free hot meals. It also has a room where people can use their drugs, with staff on hand to call 911. A few places like this still hang on under a federal exemption.
Frederick Bygrave, 39, says he lost count of people he knew that have died from drugs once the toll hit 60.
Frederick Bygrave, 39, was sitting outside, wearing a hospital bracelet from a recent stay to recover from an overdose. He said he stopped counting how many people he knew had died from drugs once the toll hit 60.
The government was wrong to close the supervised site on nearby Duke Street, he told me. Since then, more people have been using their drugs outdoors.
Just a few feet away from us, half a dozen guys huddled in a sheltered spot, openly smoking drugs. After one of them collapsed, ambulances and fire trucks arrived, lights flashing. The man recovered.
Mr. Bygrave is skeptical about the government’s plan to steer more people into addiction treatment. “I think it’s very hard to make a decision like that if you haven’t had any experience in this lifestyle. That’s like getting a butcher to give an opinion on brain surgery.”
First responders attend an overdose call after a man collapsed across the street from the encampment. Though overdose rates in the city have fallen and services for people suffering from addiction and homelessness have expanded, potent new drugs in circulation pose a renewed danger.
The next day I went back to the encampment. Parked there was a van from the Sanguen Health Centre, which used to run the old supervised site. The community-based agency continues to offer services for people on society’s margins, including nursing care, housing help and hepatitis C testing. Its mobile van has equipment that checks drugs for strength and toxicity, and its employees hand out supplies such as needles and pipes.
Sanguen’s Violet Umanetz, manager of harm reduction and outreach, told me that since the site closed, people have increasingly been using drugs in unsafe conditions. Instead of being right there to help, “we’re running, we’re calling 911, we’re trying to figure out who’s got what, where. The trauma is back for everybody all over again, just as people are starting to heal. It’s absolutely awful.”
Fortunately, overdose numbers are improving. Rabia Bana, associate medical officer of health for Waterloo, told me that in the 12 months since the site closed, opioid-related calls to emergency services have dropped by 15 per cent and opioid-related emergency-department visits have fallen by 16 per cent. Those trends, she added, are in line with what’s happening generally in the province.
But that might not tell the whole story. Ms. Umanetz said that one reason for the lower numbers in Kitchener may be that people are using their drugs in private, and so their overdoses go unreported.
The future of the encampment and its inhabitants is yet unknown, as the issue is tied up in the courts.
My final stop was at a café just off King Street. I sat down with Joe and Stephanie Mancini, co-directors of the Working Centre.
While Ms. Mancini cautions it’s too early to tell whether the HART hubs are working, the influx of provincial money means “there are more resources for people in more locations.”
On the other hand, she said, the drug crisis seems to be getting worse. Along with fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has been the main killer for years, today’s drug supply contains additives such as medetomidine, a potent veterinary tranquillizer.
“We’re watching people use, walk away, fall on their face,” Ms. Mancini said. “And they’re sleeping for hours.”
Just around the corner, a man with only socks on his feet lay prone and still on the cold concrete of the sidewalk, a flannel sheet draped over his frame.
THE DECIBEL
As the number of people experiencing homelessness grows in cities across Canada, so too have encampments – groups of people living in tents in parks, under overpasses, wherever they can find space. Globe columnist Marcus Gee explains why London is bringing city services to encampments, and how a compassionate approach is both a test and potentially a new model for other municipalities.