Supervised injection site expected downtown
Locations under review; organizers mindful of neighbour concerns
If a supervised injection site and treatment centre comes to Peterborough, it will be downtown.
But business owners and community members still have questions about what the impacts of that will be, where it will go and what that site will look like.
“Someone has just made the assumption the site should be downtown, they have not informed anybody how they arrived on that,” said Brad Smith, property owner and president of Aon Inc.
Peter Williams, development co-ordinator for Peterborough Police Service and chair of Peterborough Drug Strategy, led the discussion at the Downtown Business Improvement Area breakfast meeting on Wednesday morning where downtown businesses went back and forth with him to talk about the site location.
“We still don’t have a confirmed location so that’s one of the things we still need,” he said.
In June, conversations about bringing a supervised injection site to Peterborough ramped up when Peterborough-Kawartha MPP Dave Smith pledged his support.
While the exact model isn’t yet known by the steering committee, Smith has spoken about how consumption sites need to be coupled with wraparound services.
This comes as Peterborough ranks worryingly higher than the provincial average for opioid deaths, while the community grapples with how to prevent further loss of life.
After site selection comes consultation with the community, including neighbours to the site, which is mandated by the province, he said.
“I don’t know what our first site will look like, but whatever it looks like our intention is to continue to grow to meet the needs of Peterborough,” Williams said.
Kim Dolan, director of the Peterborough Aids Resource Network, is heading up the site selection process. She was one of the leaders behind the original plan for a supervised injection site in Peterborough in 2018.
The site will definitely be downtown, she said, but what that looks like is still unknown.
“We’re having conversations about a couple potential sites but there’s nothing right now we can report on,” Dolan said. Emergency services data shows overdoses are happening in the downtown area, she says, but the committee is mindful about the concerns of neighbours.
“We wouldn’t want to put a site beside a business or a restaurant because that probably wouldn’t help a lot of people,” she said.
Ann Farquharson, a lawyer and former city councillor, asked Williams why consultation would happen when a site has been selected, and not during the process so the community can weigh in.
Williams responded if the committee can narrow it down to multiple valid sites, the community would be able to respond. But in all likelihood there will only be one site available.
“We have been challenged with being so far from having a site because we have not been able to have a landlord engage with us in a way that gave us any hope,” Williams said.
Farquharson said she’s glad to have attended the meeting and now has a better understanding of the site selection process.
“That was very helpful to learn that,” Farquharson said. “These sites do save lives … I do hope we’re able to find a site and get the funding as soon as we can.”
Smith, whose company is the landlord for several apartment buildings in Peterborough, says he doesn’t feel as though the public has been properly consulted yet.
“Now we hear they’re looking for a site and it’s all brand new. So it’s really hard to say if you’re in favour or not because we don’t know anything,” Smith said.
Speaking to the need for an injection site, city police Chief Scott Gilbert said around 82 per cent of known or suspected overdoses this year have happened in people’s homes.
“Those are people who died alone because there wasn’t anyone there to support them or supervise them to make sure they didn’t die,” he said.
And he says it’s not just the marginalized who are affected, “it’s all walks of life,” Gilbert said. “We have professional people that are injecting in our community and are dying.”
Now is the time for the city to act, Dolan said, or else more people will die.
“We’ve got a choice: we either do something or we do nothing. And if we do nothing things will get worse, but if we do something we have a chance to make things better,” Dolan said.