A TTC streetcar in Toronto on March 2. Special constables patrol transit systems such as the TTC and OC Transpo in Ottawa.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Ontario Premier Doug Ford is engaging in a bit of creative communications with his announcement that special constables will soon be able to arrest those using illicit drugs on public transit.
The reality is that special constables, who patrol transit systems including the TTC in Toronto and OC Transpo in Ottawa, are already authorized to perform arrests for Criminal Code violations based on the way their roles are defined by their specific employers (in Ottawa, for example, as peace officers appointed by the Ottawa Police Services Board). What the Ford government is proposing is to allow these special constables new, simplified provincial authority to make arrests and lay charges via an amendment to the Restructuring Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act, which was passed last year. It’s just complicated enough to distract everyone from Mr. Ford’s private-jet purchase.
So the provincial government is not really offering a change in policy as much as it is presenting a signal: a recognition that public disorder, including the flagrant use of illicit substances on public transit, has reached intolerable levels, so now Ontario is promising to do something about it.
The degree of the problem is difficult to enumerate precisely because of the lax enforcement (indeed, no one is tallying up every time someone uses drugs on a streetcar and no one does anything about it). But those who regularly take public transit will tell you that something changed after COVID-19, when the structures that held up some of the most vulnerable in our cities collapsed. It is no longer unusual to see someone using a needle at 9 a.m. on the 501 Queen streetcar, or see not-so-stealth deals happening on the Yonge-University subway line.
Why are drug-overdose deaths rising in Edmonton, even as they fall across Canada?
And it’s not just a public transit problem. Earlier this year, Hamilton’s Central Library contemplated temporarily closing its doors because of the scale of the drug use and overdoses happening in its building; last summer, a Toronto daycare stopped taking its children on neighbourhood walks because of the open drug use and discarded paraphernalia coming from an encampment in an adjacent park.
The issue is the degeneration of our public spaces, and the effect is the slow erosion of our social contract. The more people see our rules and laws openly being violated, the less faith they have in our authorities and institutions. And those with means simply check out: they take the car instead of the bus, they move out of urban centres, or they take their kids to admission-based play cafés instead of public libraries.
Enforcement is the first step. No one has a right to do drugs on the bus or in a library, or to erect a tent in a public park. Law enforcement officials, including special constables on transit, already had the power to remove people consuming illicit substances in public spaces, but now that the Ford government has made a big show of announcing a crackdown, there should be an expectation of follow-through. That will likely necessitate the hiring of additional special constables, since those already in rotation have evidently been unable to meaningfully address the issue.
But enforcement alone won’t fix the problem, particularly when it is more than likely that transit special constables will simply “catch and release” drug users with a summons to appear before the court. Those users will then move to libraries, or playgrounds, or other public spaces where the cycle may or may not repeat.
Many will insist that Mr. Ford caused this problem by defunding drug consumption sites, but the issue of drug use on public transit predates that particular decision, and the consumption sites themselves caused their own problems for neighbouring communities (including attracting drug users to those areas).
Enforcement is the immediate, if ephemeral, solution. The long-term one is more complicated: creating a comprehensive rehabilitation and addictions management strategy, akin to what the province of Alberta unveiled under Premier Danielle Smith to expand the province’s capacity for helping those struggling with addiction. Alberta’s shift to a recovery-based model, rather than a harm-reduction model, has shown some success – the province saw a significant drop in drug poisoning deaths from 2023 to 2025 – but cities such as Edmonton remain outliers, and the plan is controversial for its inclusion of involuntary treatment. Ontario has allocated some funds to expand its Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) Hub program, but the plan consists of 28 facilities for the entire province, with only enough beds for hundreds of people, not the thousands who need them.
So Ontario will need a better plan – a real one, and probably an expensive one – to keep drug users off transit for good. Otherwise, special constables will just be removing them from a bus, and sending them to a playground.