A man restocks supplies at St. Stephen's Community House in Toronto's Kensington Market neighbourhood, in 2019.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Six former Toronto mayors are calling on the Ontario government to restore funding for supervised drug-use sites and repeal legislation that led to many site closings, arguing that deaths and public spending have increased in their wake.
The former mayors – David Crombie, Art Eggleton, Barbara Hall, David Miller, John Sewell and John Tory – released an open letter late Tuesday to Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones, both of whom insisted on Wednesday the province would stay the course.
The government is forcing the closing of nearly every drug-use site in the province, including at least six in Toronto.
“We recognize that sites are not a stand-alone solution to the overdose crisis or substance use – but they are a critical component of a comprehensive, evidence-based system of care,” the former mayors said in their letter. “Removing them from Ontario does not improve anyone’s health or make anyone safer, but leads to more death and increased public expenditures.”
In 2024, the government passed legislation to ban sites within 200 metres of schools or daycares, targeting 10 sites, most of which have converted to treatment hubs. Last week, Ontario confirmed it was cutting provincial funding for another eight drug-use sites, which must now transition to abstinence-based treatment facilities.
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The province has also banned new sites from opening.
A handful of donor-funded sites are still operational in Toronto.
Bill Sinclair, chief executive officer of The Neighbourhood Group, which operates the Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site, said it has reported a substantial bump in traffic since the closings.
“We’ve seen a doubling in the number of visits that we’re receiving,” said Mr. Sinclair. “We recently had our worst December, our worst January and our worst February. It’s very busy and it’s a huge strain on our resources.”
Drug-use sites, where people can use drugs under medical supervision, have come under fire from mostly conservative governments across Canada that favour recovery supports over harm reduction. Alberta, last Friday, announced it was closing a long-standing site in Calgary and a mobile unit in Lethbridge.
Advocates of drug-use sites emphasize that they are a life-saving service and help to bridge people to social supports and treatment. Critics, meanwhile, claim these sites increase social disorder and crime in the surrounding area, negatively affecting businesses and residents.
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The former mayors said site operators must understand their obligation to surrounding neighbourhoods but that properly run sites “prevent neighbourhood disruption, including from unsupervised consumption and illegal drug dealing.”
“If we don’t have supervised consumption sites, a lot more drug use will happen out in public, so we’ll see more people dead outside, more taking drugs in Tim Hortons’ washrooms and it gets worse for all of us,” said Mr. Sewell, who instigated the letter, in an interview.
The group referenced data that show overdose deaths and calls to emergency services have increased since site closings. The data were included in an evidence brief from university experts Gillian Kolla and Tara Gomes, published last Friday.
In Ontario, EMS calls for opioid overdoses increased by nearly 70 per cent after drug-use site closings last April. Additionally, data from Ontario’s Chief Coroner show there was a roughly 19-per-cent increase in confirmed and probable opioid deaths between April and October, 2025, according to the brief.
Dr. Kolla, in an interview, said: “It’s really clear that we’re seeing a reversal right now where numbers of EMS calls and emergency department visits and deaths are going back up again after a period of decline.”
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Mr. Ford, at an unrelated news conference on Wednesday, said the former mayors are “totally wrong” and pointed to a recent study out of Alberta that he says shows their claims are “totally false.”
The study from the Canadian Centre of Recovery Excellence, an Alberta Crown corporation, concluded that the closing of a drug-use site in Red Deer did not lead to increased deaths, hospital visits or ambulance calls. However, the study noted that the findings are “inconclusive” because of a limited 26-week follow-up period.
A group of academics from the University of Alberta and University of Calgary have scrutinized the study and its authors, arguing there is limited support for the study’s claims and that some authors did not properly identify conflicts of interest.
Ms. Jones said on Wednesday that Ontario will not reverse course. “We want to ensure that there is a pathway out of addictions,” she said.
Ontario Liberal MPP Adil Shamji, an emergency physician and the party’s public-health critic, said the concerns laid out in the letter are consistent to what he’s hearing on the ground from clinicians.
“Anecdotally, they are seeing more deaths, and they are finding it more difficult to deliver important mental-health and addictions interventions,” he told reporters at Queen’s Park.
Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles, also at Queen’s Park, said Ontario’s decision to defund sites is not following the evidence.