Province to open Moss Park injection site
Government will work with harm-reduction workers operating pop-up site
Ontario is dispatching its Emergency Medical Assistance Team to set up a tent in Moss Park to provide a heated and insulated space for safe injections.
“This is an overdose crisis. People are dying and, today, Minister Eric Hoskins and the Ontario government have stepped up,” Councillor Joe Cressy said Wednesday night. The tent will be set up Thursday and replace a temporary site run by the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society (TOPS). The ministry will work with TOPS staff, Cressy said.
Earlier in the day, harm-reduction workers had gathered for a press conference in Moss Park to draw attention to the need for warm and safe space for the people they serve and how red tape in a time of crisis is endangering lives.
“We are in a public health emergency,” harm-reduction worker Zoe Dodd said. “We are asking the province and the federal government and the city to ignore legal exemptions and let rooms open to save lives across the province.”
The tent opened in August and was set up and taken down each day by TOPS members. Staffed by off-theclock nurses and volunteers, the tent supervised 1,976 injections and stopped or reversed 85 drug overdoses, according to staff.
The organizers had been speaking with the city and multi-service agency Fred Victor about moving their services into the agency’s basement while they waited for an exemption from the federal government that would allow them to operate legally.
That move would not be possible, they had been told, without federal approval. With winter approaching, the tent would not be sufficient shelter for them to provide life-saving work, they said. In the interim, they said they wanted city support to open a trailer in Moss Park and the province to declare a state of emergency.
Fred Victor’s executive director, Mark Aston, said the agency is deeply supportive of the work being done in the park, but after lengthy in- house discussions, they determined they need the exemption before they can provide a space for this service.
Mayor John Tory and Ontario Minister of Health and Long-Term Care Eric Hoskins wrote a joint letter to federal Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor on Tuesday requesting the application be approved immediately. “Under the circumstances and the urgency of this local situation, we ask that you provide a short-term or conditional exemption to enable the service to open as soon as possible,” they wrote.
Petitpas Taylor told the Star Wednesday that once the application arrives she has instructed her staff to move as quickly as possible, but could not provide a timeline. “We do know it is time-sensitive. We recognize that winter is fast approaching,” she said.
On Monday, the city’s public health committee heard that 70 people have died as a result of homelessness in Toronto this year.
Leon “Pops” Alward, 46, told the Star he overdosed at a friend’s place in October and was revived using Naloxone, a medication that blocks or reverses opioid overdoses. People are relying on each other for harm reduction and without low-barrier sites like the tent, he said, deaths are guaranteed to rise.
Before the province announced it would set up a site in Moss Park, Councillor Cressy had said the city had an “ethical obligation” to address the needs of a vulnerable population.
“If the federal government is not willing to expedite the exemption or willing to change the law I believe the city and the province should ignore them,” he said. With files from David Rider