Sault Ste. Marie's mayor says he would welcome an announcement from the province that the process for supervised consumption sites is reopening, but hopes that announcement will come with a funding commitment.
On Monday, Premier Doug Ford told reporters during an unrelated announcement in Essex County that the province will finish its review of provincially funded consumption and treatment services (CTS) sites soon.
Ford suggested he's not looking to change the total number of CTS sites across the province, which his government has capped at 21.
"In total, we said there'd be 21 sites. We're at 17, so there's four more to go," he said.
Matthew Shoemaker, mayor of Sault Ste. Marie, has publicly vented his frustrations about the shutting down of the process, put in place in response to a shooting in the summer outside one such site in Toronto.
Sault Ste. Marie does not have a supervised consumption site, but in December then-CAO Malcolm White presented a report to council laying out possible next steps for the municipality to support one in the city.
Asked on Tuesday about Ford's comments about the possible reopening of the application process, Shoemaker said he would welcome such an announcement.
"Advocates and experts across a broad spectrum, including the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, have endorsed this approach as one of the tools that can help treat substance abuse in a community," said Shoemaker.
He said he hopes the eventual announcement will come with funding, which was hard for some municipalities to come by even before the application process was closed. If the process is reopened soon the Sault will be competing with some other municipalities who have supported their own sites without provincial assistance.
"I am anxiously awaiting the details, however, as prior to the pause on approvals the Provincial government was not providing funding for these sites in places such as Sudbury and Timmins," said Shoemaker. "To re-open the approvals process without committing funding would represent only a small step in the right direction on a crisis in which we need leaps forward.”
Last month, Shoemaker fired back in a letter to Ontario's associate minister of Mental Health and Addictions Michael Tibollo after he made a visit to the Sault and deflected criticism that his government was not doing enough to curb the opioid epidemic in northern Ontario.
“To suggest that we are not addressing the issue is really, to me, counter intuitive to what we are doing,” Tibololo told SooToday at the event. “What I would like to hear from them is suggestions as to how we improve treatment and recovery and continue to grow and develop the systems that we have in place.”
In his letter a few weeks later, Shoemaker noted the most recent opioid mortality statistics released by the Office of the Chief Coroner which continue to show the Sault has among th highest death rates in the province.
Shoemaker told Tibollo in the letter that, although those statistics are concerning for Sault Ste. Marie, they show the promise in communities where supervised consumption sites have been operating.
“For example, Thunder Bay and Sudbury have supervised consumption sites, and both saw decreases in emergency department visits and hospitalizations for the third quarter of 2023, while Sault Ste. Marie experienced sharp increases in emergency department visits and hospitalizations during the same period,” Shoemaker wrote.
In his letter, Shoemaker also noted he and former mayor Christian Provenzano reached out to the Ford government ten times about support for the mental health and addiction crisis and received few responses.
— With files from Jack Hauen, The Trillium
