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Derek Finkle: This injection site was shut down. What followed proved activists wrong

New study about closure of Alberta site shows there was no increase in overdose deaths

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Last week, CTV News published an article with a headline harm reduction activists across the country pounced on: “Drug overdoses in Toronto up nearly 50 per cent since last January, city data shows.”

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The party to blame in their view, of course, is the Ontario government because it closed injection sites within 250 metres of schools and daycares a year ago. But if you look at the data the story was based on, the activists’ I-told-you-so’s are wildly off the mark.

Derek Finkle: This injection site was shut down. What followed proved activists wrong Back to video

While there was a rise in emergency service calls for non-fatal overdoses in December and January in Toronto, responses to fatal overdoses between January of last year and this year remained consistent. The number of fatal overdoses this January, 12, was in line with the monthly average for 2025 (11).

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As I wrote in a previous column, overdoses did not spike when four injection sites in Toronto closed on March 31, 2025, as harm reduction proponents had repeatedly warned they would. In fact, according to the Toronto Overdose Information System, monthly fatal overdoses have been lower every month since the last month those now-closed sites were open (May being the only exception; it had the same number as March 2025).

As for calls for non-fatal overdoses, those remained below or (briefly) on par with 2024 data for eight months after the closures. When predictions that fatal overdoses would skyrocket as soon as some sites in the city were closed didn’t materialize,........

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