Advocates, artists, community organizations, healthcare professionals and faith leaders gathered at the Metropolitan United Church on Saturday with a clear message for the Ford government: supervised consumption sites save lives.
The province-wide closure of the sites is set to take effect next month after the provincial government announced it would stop funding Ontario’s eight remaining publicly funded supervised consumption sites, replacing them with an abstinence-based approach to addiction recovery with its new Homeless and Addiction Recovery Treatment hubs, otherwise known as HART hubs.
“I’m actually two-and-a-half years sober, so it’s been a long time since I’ve had to access a site as a user, but I wouldn’t be here without them. They saved my life countless times, and they gave me the strength to change my life,” said Jason Miles.
“We’re not meeting people where they are anymore. Not everybody’s journey gets to be an abstinent journey and certainly not initially, so we’re really talking about leaving a lot of people behind without care.”
Saturday’s protest was the latest of several rallies held over the past few months in an attempt to raise awareness about the potentially fatal impacts community workers say service closures will have on vulnerable communities, deepening what they call an already devastating overdose crisis.
In April, Toronto paramedics reported responding to a total of 485 non-fatal opioid overdose calls – more than double compared to the same time last year. The number of suspected drug toxicities treated by emergency medical services across Ontario jumped from 604 in the first quarter of 2025 to 1,024 in the third, according to data collected by Ontario Drug Policy Research Network.
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Ontario recorded 648 suspected overdose deaths in the first quarter of this year, down from 703 in the same period last year, according to data from the chief coroner’s office. Fatal opioid overdoses reached a high during the COVID-19 pandemic but have generally fallen year over year since then.
“The people who rely on these services, they’re not just there to inject drugs in a supervised way, they’re accessing healthcare, this is a community,” said event organizer Chetlan Mehta.
The first supervised consumption site in Ontario opened in 2017, and according to federal data, they have recorded more than 1.4 million visits between 2020 and November 2025. More than 26,000 overdoses have also been reversed at these sites over the same period, the data shows.
In April of 2024, the Ford government forced the closure of nine sites that it deemed too close to schools and daycares, citing public-safety concerns. But advocates say the closures will only create a cascade of other issues.
“The province should be expanding safe consumption sites, they should be also expanding HART hubs and providing more supports to healthcare facilities and agencies,” said Toronto Centre Coun. Chris Moise. “Addiction is healthcare, mental health is healthcare, and healthcare is a provincial responsibility, so the province is negating its responsibility by not providing services to the most marginalized in our community.”
The Fred Victor Centre and South Riverdale Community Health Centre – the last two provincially funded sites in Toronto – were informed by the Ontario Ministry of Health that it would no longer be providing them with provincial funds as of June 13.
Files from The Canadian Press were used in this report