The province of Ontario did something last month it has never done before — it defunded a supervised injection site because the chaos and disorder it was causing had reached unacceptable levels for the surrounding neighbours.The injection site is in Parkdale, a neighbourhood on the west side of Toronto.
The community’s efforts to get the province to act were detailed in my previous column at the beginning of October. Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones was simply unable to ignore the mountain of photographic evidence featuring prostrate bodies next to piles of used needles as known drug dealers operated nearby.
The province informed the site it was cutting off its funding — most injection sites are provincially funded — effective Nov. 22. ...
In the weeks and months after Huebner-Makurat’s death, South Riverdale (and aligned activists) adopted a cagey crisis-management strategy that declined to acknowledge its injection site had anything to do with drug dealers it allowed to operate with impunity on its perimeter, even after one of its harm-reduction staffers, Khalila Mohammed, was arrested for aiding and abetting one of the drug dealers who’d attacked Hudson in his escape from the scene. (Mohammed has since pleaded guilty and been sentenced.)
When Tara Riley told her story in the National Post about what it was like to work at South Riverdale’s injection site for years, the centre’s CEO at the time, Jason Altenberg, took exception to Riley writing about how drug dealers often wormed their way into the injection site and sold illegal drugs to clients from inside the site. In a statement responding to Riley’s story, Altenberg wrote the following: “Do we allow drug dealers to set up shop inside the Centre? Absolutely not.”
This doesn’t line up with what South Riverdale harm reduction employee Samuel MacLeod testified to at Hudson’s trial. MacLeod told the court that it was quite common for the site’s clients to buy drugs, usually fentanyl, inside the site. As for drug dealing around the site, MacLeod said it was rampant.
One of MacLeod’s colleagues, Derek Venman, testified he saw “a lot of drug dealing” in the courtyard next to the injection site. Hudson had been known to staff for at least a year prior to the shooting. The jury heard Venman say that Ahmed Ibrahim, the drug dealer Mohammed had assisted in his getaway (who recently pleaded guilty to manslaughter), was selling drugs right outside South Riverdale daily in the weeks leading up to the killing.
Ibrahim was such a common fixture, Venman testified, that no one thought twice about him walking inside the health centre to get water when he was thirsty or use the washroom.
Wiens, in the incident report, responded to a question asking what she would recommend “to prevent a reoccurrence” with eight words: “Reduction of guns and gangs in the city.”
What if Wiens and her management team hadn’t created a culture that resulted in armed drug dealers being warmly embraced for years right outside of her injection site? In 2016, before the site opened, South Riverdale warranted to the Toronto Board of Health and its neighbours that it would adhere to a “zero-tolerance drug dealing policy.” The site’s negligent abandonment of this promise came into focus during MacLeod’s cross-examination on Wednesday; it was revealed that when staff gathered for a debrief after the shooting, management’s primary concern was not “guns and gangs” but how this fatal shooting was going to impact their injection site.
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