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Derek Finkle: Health Canada ignored police, parents and provinces to renew injection sites

Police warnings, community outrage after a fatal shooting, and provincial pushback were all ignored as Health Canada renewed the exemptions

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Federal health minister Marjorie Michel was on the hot seat in February when the Conservatives’ senior member on the parliamentary health committee, Dan Mazier, grilled her about injection sites.

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Mazier wanted to know why the minister and her department, Health Canada, had renewed the federal drug law exemption, which injection sites require to operate, for an Ottawa site last year, when not only community associations but the city’s chief of police, Eric Stubbs, had submitted letters strenuously opposing that outcome.

Derek Finkle: Health Canada ignored police, parents and provinces to renew injection sites Back to video

Mazier read an excerpt from Stubbs’ letter, reported on in a column of mine at the time, in which the police chief said his force was “especially troubled by the unintended but serious consequences, such as the closure of nearby childcare facilities due to safety concerns, a situation that is without precedence in our city.” He wanted to know if the minister was aware that a daycare had closed because of the injection site.

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Michel was decidedly uninterested in answering this question. So, Mazier pressed on, wanting to know why the minister had “ignored law enforcement.”

Michel responded that she had read Stubbs’ letter, but that there were other factors that went into the eventual approval of the exemption renewal for the site. She didn’t say what any of those factors were; instead, the minister took cover by pointing out that it is the provinces that choose to fund such sites, and federal authorities simply follow their lead by providing the necessary exemptions.

The idea that Health Canada, in renewing the exemption for the site in Ottawa’s Sandy Hill neighbourhood, was taking its cues from the Ontario government of Doug Ford, who openly detests injection sites, is about as fantastical as Donald Trump distributing an image depicting himself as Jesus Christ.

The Sandy Hill injection site was informed on March 5 by Health Canada that its exemption was being renewed for one year. Eleven days later, the Ford government announced it was cutting financial support for the remaining seven supervised consumption sites the province still funded, including Sandy Hill’s, as of June 13, 2026.

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Why would the Ford government lobby Michel and Health Canada to renew the Sandy Hill injection site’s exemption if it had imminent plans to completely sever its purse strings?

Health Canada is by no means some passive support system for provinces who decide to open injection sites. It has its own agenda, and what’s quite clear is that it doesn’t feel obligated to follow its provincial dance partners’ footsteps, as our health minister suggests, nor does it seem particularly moved by communities opposed to them because of legitimate safety concerns.

Months before community members in Sandy Hill began imploring Health Canada to turn down its site’s renewal application, the injection site I lived across the street from in the east side of downtown Toronto was going through its own exemption renewal drama.

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The denizens of my neighbourhood, Leslieville, launched a campaign of their own with Health Canada, fueled by years of largely ignored safety concerns that culminated in the 2023 fatal shooting of a local mother who walked into the middle of a gun fight between drug dealers in front of our injection site.

The flurry of emails opposing the South Riverdale Community Health Centre’s injection site exemption renewal application were sent in the weeks prior to the expiry of the site’s exemption on Nov. 30, 2024. Even though the Ontario government had announced months earlier that it would soon be passing legislation prohibiting injection sites within 150 meters of schools and daycares, which South Riverdale was, Health Canada approved its exemption renewal anyway.

I filed a freedom-of-information request in December 2024 to obtain all materials pertaining to Health Canada’s decision. A year later, Health Canada still hadn’t provided me with anything, so the federal Information Commissioner took the department to court. In late February, Health Canada finally coughed up 1,200 pages worth of documents.

My neighbours’ emailed expressions of concern, emails sent by dozens of community members in the disclosure, stood in stark contrast to the rosy picture the site painted in its Enhanced Security and Community Engagement Plan submitted in 2024. In one Health Canada briefing memo, the South Riverdale decision was elevated to “more senior levels” — not just because of the well-publicized shooting but also because they had received several recent communications from citizens related to the renewal, and their concerns about safety, security, and what they saw as a “lack of community engagement.”

On October 28, 2024, South Riverdale responded to a Health Canada request for additional information, in part regarding a survey the site had distributed two months earlier to demonstrate community engagement. At that point, the site conceded that the top two “themes” from 213 survey responses were: the site should be shut down, and that there needed to be more transparency and listening. Ten days prior to the exemption’s expiry, Health Canada followed up again, requesting the survey’s raw submission data from the site.

In the end, Health Canada was left with three consequence-laden possibilities: approve the application, likely triggering “a significant amount of negative media coverage and community concern,” delay it by engaging a section of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act that allows for a 90-day period of community consultation, or reject it and risk “serious impacts on the well-being” of the site and its clients, as well as possible legal action from the site. Health Canada and then-Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Ya’ara Saks chose to approve the renewal.

The result? The harms ultimately caused by Ontario shuttering about half of its injection sites on March 31, 2025, including South Riverdale’s, are likely not what Health Canada expected. Fatal overdoses in Toronto are essentially unchanged from what they were at the beginning of 2025, before the closures. January to March of this year saw an 8 per cent decrease in suspected drug-related deaths across Ontario from the same period last year.

These data points mirror a study published in March about an injection site in Red Deer, Alberta, which also closed on March 31, 2025. Fatalities and emergency department visits did not increase for the site’s clients after it shut down.

In late March, Dan Mazier announced that he would be introducing federal legislation to ban injection sites from operating within 500 meters of schools and daycare facilities. It will be interesting to see how the Liberals, armed with floor-crossing Conservatives who campaigned not so long ago on closing such sites, respond to Mazier’s proposition.

Around the same time Mazier unveiled his proposed legislation, the Ontario Liberal Party told the press there was a place for injection sites, but only if they were attached to a hospital or community clinic.

Even in NDP-governed British Columbia, times are a-changin.’ Dr. Daniel Vigo, B.C.’s chief scientific advisor for psychiatry, toxic drugs and concurrent disorders, has spoken harrowingly of the “shadow crisis” of brain injuries resulting from concurrent mental health and opioid disorders. Injection sites, despite noble intentions, caused significant harms. “The way it was implemented,” Vigo said, “was completely blind to the fact that for those with severe mental illness, harm reduction is not harm reduction, it is harm enhancement.”

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