Cambridge prepares for battle over potential injection site

CAMBRIDGE — Galt’s downtown business district is no place to set up a supervised drug injection site, Frank Monteiro says.

That’s what the Cambridge city councillor learned from a recent tour of such sites already established in Toronto, Ottawa, London and Montreal.

“I would not ... not put it in our core,” Monteiro told a crowd of 50 at a special city council meeting on Monday night.

“We need it, but not here. It has to be outside the core.”

But the region could still go ahead and put such a site, where addicts can safely take their drugs amid an ongoing national opioids overdose crisis that claimed 71 local lives last year, in Galt.

Two safe injection sites, perhaps a third, are being considered by the region in an effort to save lives and help addicts recover. The downtowns of Galt and Kitchener are being eyed for locations.

South Cambridge, like central Kitchener, is a hot spot for opioid overdose calls. And the vulnerable Galt core is at its obvious

heart.

But a safe injection site would have a detrimental impact on Galt’s downtown, Monteiro said.

“If we do this, what we’ve done for downtown Cambridge — the post office, the bridge, the theatre, everything else with the mill and everything else that’s coming — well, forget about it,” he said.

“We cannot support this. We have to think about the business people and their investment.”

Monteiro, who was joined by fellow councillor Mike Mann, plus city and regional staff, in touring supervised injection sites in the cores of Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, says Galt’s downtown is too small to host such a site. The operation, he believes, would not blend in.

“In Ottawa, there’s a lot of street people, it’s noticeable. In Toronto, it wasn’t because they’re mixed in with other people ... there’s so many people walking around, you don’t notice,” Monteiro said.

“If I noticed it in Ottawa, we would notice even more here.”

Monteiro also visited a temporary overdose prevention site in London, noting it will move outside of the downtown core when it becomes permanent.

Mann agreed that Galt’s business core is too small to carry a supervised injection site and shrug off the ripple effect it would create. The Galt core area has just 1,000 residents over 106 acres, Monteiro said, compared to 3,400 people and 253 acres in downtown Kitchener.

Monteiro believes people in need of the site’s services will make their way to it, even if it is outside the Galt core, perhaps in walking distance.

Both councillors noted that discarded needles have already been found in public spaces beyond the boundaries of Galt’s core.

“There’s a concentration in a specific part of Cambridge,” Mann said. “But we’ve also heard that 20 to 30 per cent of our needles are found in the core area. What about the other 70 to 80 per cent that are outside of the core? We have to take that into consideration.” Ultimately, the decision on a location for a Cambridge supervised injection site will rest with the region, which is set to host a public consultation on the matter at Cambridge City Hall on April 4.

An April 10 vote at the region could push pursuit of the sites forward. But Cambridge politicians — regional councillors Karl Kiefer and Helen Jowett were in attendance Monday — may be preparing for a battle to keep a site out of the Galt core.

Mayor Doug Craig wants city council to send a message to the region. A resolution on the city council agenda for Tuesday night urged the region to consult with the city and pick a site outside the Galt downtown core.

The resultion was approved. Council also asked that the Preston and Hespeler cores not be home to a site.

On Monday, Craig said he didn’t like that, should the region move forward to pursue safe injection sites, candidate sites would be determined before the next public consultation phase.

“That would seem to me to be backwards,” Craig said.

Karen Quigley-Hobbs, the region’s director of infectious diseases, dental and sexual health, thought the process was in the right order.

“I think that it’s important, before we go out to community consultation, we have something very concrete for people,” Quigley-Hobbs said.

“Not only would we need the location, we would need the actual service model and types of services that would be offered there.”

Dan Clements, a spokesperson for the citizens group For a Better Cambridge, expressed support for a supervised injection site outside the Galt core, but only with some conditions.

Those conditions included locating the site at least a 15-minute walk from the corner of Main Street and Ainslie Street, and not near The Bridges downtown homeless shelter.

“The Bridges already has many challenges to deal with,” Clements said. “A nearby S-I-S would just create bigger issues.”