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LILLEY: Ford right, former mayors wrong on closing drug sites in Toronto

Former mayors want Ford to keep injection sites open, but facts don't back up their claims about saving lives

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Bad ideas seem to live forever in politics even when facts show them to be wrong, failed and unworkable.

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That’s the takeaway from seeing the letter from six former Toronto mayors to Ontario Premier Doug Ford begging him to keep drug consumption sites open.

LILLEY: Ford right, former mayors wrong on closing drug sites in Toronto Back to video

Thankfully, Ford has told the six – John Tory, David Miller, Barbara Hall, Art Eggleton, David Crombie and John Sewell – that he’s not listening to them, he’s moving ahead with treatment rather than needles and crack pipes.

“I want to help these people, but I’m not going to sit back as you put these injection sites in the middle of communities. There’s needles all over the place. It’s dangerous for kids and communities,” Ford said in response to the letter.

Drug sites bring violence and chaos

Ford began the process of shutting down so-called “safe injection sites” or supervised consumption sites after the July 2023 shooting death of Karolina Huebner-Makurat, a 44-year-old wife and mother of two young children.

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Huebner-Makurat had been walking down Queen St. E. in Toronto when she was shot and killed by a stray bullet fired in a shootout between rival drug dealers across the street. The dealers had been battling over turf to sell drugs outside the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, which was at that time home to a safe injection site.

Khalila Mohammed, a worker at the site, was convicted of being an accessory after the fact for helping one of the drug dealers — who she was in a relationship with — escape.

This might be an extreme example of the harms these safe injection sites cause communities, but it’s a telling one. These sites, at least the way they were set up in Toronto and across Ontario, didn’t help addicts — they aided and abetted them in their addiction.

Sites got taken over by activists

The claim was that these sites would help people by giving them a path to recovery, but it never happened. Instead, they were taken over by activists who push an agenda for ever greater liberalization of drug laws.

“It is a philosophy about being simply respectful of and to people who use drugs. No judgment, no expectations and no desire for people to stop using drugs,” read the website of the SRCHC even weeks after the shooting.

The “harm reduction” industry in Ontario, and it is an industry, doesn’t believe in recovery.

The former mayors have bought into the lies pushed by these activists. In their letter, the mayors argue that the sites have saved lives and stopped overdoses.

“Removing them from Ontario does not improve anyone’s health or make anyone safer, but leads to more death and increased public expenditures,” the letter reads.

It’s a puzzling argument when you look at the facts.

The numbers don’t lie

In 2016, before Ontario had any safe-injection sites, we saw 868 opioid deaths across the province, 186 of which were in Toronto. By 2019, there were 1,565 opioid deaths across Ontario with 301 of them in Toronto.

That’s an 80% increase in opioid deaths provincewide, a 62% increase in Toronto, after introducing these sites.

In British Columbia, where these sites have been active much longer, data from the B.C. Coroners Service shows a steady increase in opioid overdose deaths over the years. In 2015, B.C. recorded 528 opioid overdose deaths, by 2025 the number of deaths had more than tripled to 1,833.

In 2023, B.C.’s worst year, there were 2,590 deaths in that province compared to 2,643 in Ontario. The population of Ontario is three times larger than British Columbia’s and yet they have almost as many opioid deaths despite fully embracing the false promise of so-called harm reduction policies.

Alberta is showing recovery works

Alberta, which has embraced addiction recovery over the past few years and rejected harm reduction, has shown how closing injection sites can lead to better outcomes.

A major study out just two weeks ago and published in the journal Addiction followed 381 users of a site in Red Deer. The study tracked them from June 2024 through September 2025, six months after the site closed, and showed there was a 6.2% increase in people opting for rehabilitation services.

The study also found that the closure did not result in increased deaths, emergency department visits, or ambulance calls.

So, Ford can listen to the facts, and embrace treatment, which will improve lives, or he can listen to six former mayors clinging to a bad idea that only leads to more deaths.

Ford is on the right path.

blilley@postmedia.com

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