By Diana Chan McNally Contributor
Diana Chan McNally is a Maytree Fellow who works with homeless people in Toronto.

It’s been almost one year since Premier Doug Ford mandated that supervised consumption sites — including four in Toronto — shut down. Since then, the premier has closed a fifth site and quietly shut down overdose prevention sites embedded in shelters.

Having worked in harm reduction for over a decade, what’s happening now is exactly what I expected. Just two months after sites were shut down, drop-in centres across Toronto reported a 288 per cent increase in overdoses. Library workers are also seeing more overdoses. So are transit workers.

In Toronto, while TTC safety is improving, the perception is that the TTC is unsafe — with a major focus being on drug use.

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Last year, Ford passed Bill 6, which targets homeless people — specifically encampment residents — by making public drug use illegal. Bill 6 conflates public drug use and homelessness as the same issue, punishable with up to six months of jail time, a $10,000 fine, or both.

Someone doesn’t have to be actively using drugs to be subject to this law; a police officer only needs to believe that they might possess or be using drugs to target them. No burden of proof needed.

To be clear, what Ford is proposing isn’t to make drug use illegal on the TTC or any other transit system — it’s already illegal. What he’s proposing is to expand Bill 6’s powers to transit constables to target people believed to be using drugs on public transit — with emphasis on “believe.”

Importantly, transit constables are not police officers. However, Ford wants to give them the powers of police to request ID and order people to leave transit property, as well as the power to detain, charge, or arrest anyone who refuses to comply. Transit constables would also be given the power to seize and destroy personal belongings that they believe contain drugs.

These are considerable powers. Even the Toronto Police Association has opposed them. They also raise the question: what does someone who uses drugs look like?

In its original intention, Bill 6 ties drug use to encampments, making the target demographic abundantly clear: unsheltered people. Although this is still the intention, the target becomes murkier when transposed from a homeless encampment to a public system like the TTC.

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What Ford is doing — intentionally or not — is opening up all transit riders to profiling and enforcement if they look like “drug users,” which could significantly worsen safety for many Torontonians.

For communities that are already at risk of profiling, there’s a heightened potential for discrimination on public transit — an issue that already disproportionately impacts Black and Indigenous riders.

Moreover, there are no safeguards to prevent or address discrimination in Ford’s proposed regulations. If anything, they’re a green light for transit constables to engage in unjustified profiling and enforcement with less oversight and accountability than police.

For people sheltering on transit, removing them doesn’t address the fact that they don’t have housing, or that the drug supply remains incredibly toxic. Instead, it limits a shortening list of spaces they are allowed to exist while offering them no alternatives.

Currently, the City of Toronto deploys outreach and case management support to people who are unsheltered or in crisis on the TTC; this is the correct approach, but Ford’s proposal undermines it.

People have a right to be safe on transit. At the same time, everyone has a right to use transit — including people who use drugs and are homeless people.

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If we want to see less public drug use and people sheltering on transit, we must begin by reopening and expanding supervised consumption sites and by addressing housing unaffordability.

Increasing surveillance and extending police powers doesn’t solve these issues — it merely opens up the broader public to arbitrary punishment, including the potential for jail time and $10,000 fines.

Premier Ford, does that seem safe to you?

In Hamilton, we have to close our central library because of drug use.

Name one thing Doug Ford has not enshittified since 2018.

This is so fucking sad on every level.. 😔

As always, things have to get worse before action is taken that addresses the material conditions leading to these problems, with people suffering and dying in the process.

I was always a proponent of safe injection sites because all the experts agreed it was the best way to reduce overdoses and help people with drug addictions. What gives me pause is how it went in Vancouver and how the public turned against it to the point that it was a major election talking point. I wonder why it failed there and what can be learned from it.

his wellbeing

Can you confirm you mean safe injection sites and not safe supply?

I could be wrong but I assumed the article was referring to safe injection sites.

You're right about that! I just thought the controversy in BC was about safe supply, but I am out of the loop and not doing a good job googling.

I worked at Dundas and Victoria for years, just around the corner from the safe injection site for years and the only way you could tell it was there was the sign. I know they were never without controversy but it would suck if they were facing increased backlash.

Basically, safe injection sites are step 1 in a several step process to help drug users stay safe. Step 2 is immediately available access to counselling and rehab facilities for those who want it.

Step 2 costs a lot of money, so it doesn't get implemented, and then it looks like it doesn't work. It does work. If you're building a subway system and stop after digging a big hole in the ground, it doesn't mean subways don't work; it means politicians don't care enough to make it happen.

He made the drug problem EVERYWHERE worse.

that word means something specific, and that's not it.

The bank accounts of himself, and his business associates

Before BC decriminalized and pushed for more safe supply, there was a supply issue for precursor hemicals used in fentanyl and other street drugs from China. The supply got resolved and drug use/availability went up as BC started its new policies, resulting in worse drug use. The timing was horrible and everybody assumed correlation = causation.

You'll notice that most of the people pushing on this topic are conservatives who not only oppose safe supply, but also oppose safe injection which is categorically and undisputably effective, backed by mountainas of medical evidence from around the world.

Safe injection sites save lives.