On August 20th the Ford Administration announced the imminent closure of 10 Supervised Consumption Sites (SCSs) across the Province and forthcoming legislation barring any municipality or organization from opening a new SCS or participating in federal safer supply initiatives.
As the nation’s oldest sex worker justice initiative, we opened our doors to expand access to harm reduction supports and community engagement through an era of our city’s history where the distribution of safer use supplies was illegal. Harm reduction programming, access to safe supply and safe consumption sites are central components of compassionate care and community engagement. We’re deeply concerned at several parallels between the framing of these efforts as “Protection of Communities”, “Protecting Children” and “Supporting Recovery” through a policy framework that targets and vilifies our communities, while erasing the voices, contributions and widely distributed public health research demonstrating the life-saving intervention SCS’s provide. Sex workers, drug users and people navigating extreme poverty, homelessness, addictions and mental health related circumstances are not a “threat” to community, we are part of your community.
We are living through one of the most devastating overdose crises in recent history and we must be clear about the intention and the implication of this decision from the Ford Administration: this decision will kill people. The closure of SCSs that provide life affirming care, challenge social isolation and provide low barrier access to harm reduction supplies, education and best practices will directly result in the death of our communities. We are losing friends, family and loved ones at greater rates than ever before- intervening in increasingly severe overdoses and overdose-related deaths. We work closely with each of the five Toronto SCS’s slated for closure and if community members cannot access these spaces, they will die on the streets, they will die in parks, they will die in alleyways and there is nothing we can do to prepare ourselves for this degree of loss.
Our Street Outreach and Community Engagement Program has undergone significant restructuring to address the sharp uptick in overdoses, overdose-related deaths and harm reduction work that increasingly looks like palliative care for communities engaged in street-based sex work, drug users, communities navigating chronic homelessness, criminalization and other significant barriers to accessing life-affirming, compassionate care. We are seeing more people living and dying on the streets, in encampments and shelters now than at any point over the last decade- the Provincial response, characterizing our communities as a threat, a danger and a nuisance is a war on poor people, sex workers, drug users and historically oppressed communities and it will kill people.
There is a deep and profound fear that comes with this Provincial announcement, because there is nothing that can prepare any one person, organization or public health system to navigate the degree of loss, death and life-long trauma that will follow this decision through our communities, across generations. We cannot rely on the Ford Administration, we cannot rely on the Toronto Police Service or carceral solutions to address this crisis because they are responsible for the austerity measures that starve our communities of vital supports; they are responsible for predatory policing and legal frameworks that target, isolate, displace and kill historically oppressed communities, sex workers, drug users and unhoused people; they are responsible for the moral panic characterizing those of us struggling to survive and support one another as a threat to “community”, to children and to public safety.
We are responsible to our community members and our mandate to support, protect and defend the human rights of our communities by any means necessary. Public health experts, harm reduction advocates and many of us with lived experience all point towards the devastating realities of removing SCS’s and the normalization of discriminatory and dehumanizing characterizations of our communities. If we fail to act in the face of policy decisions that further escalate the devastation, loss of life and barriers our communities face, we share in the responsibility for that loss of life. If we refuse to act in a moment where policy intervention will result in death, we too are responsible. Anything short of actively challenging and defying harmful regulatory frameworks that starve us of resources and kill our communities off makes us complicit.
We refuse to let our friends, family, loved ones and community members die like this and we will not accept policy interventions that leave our communities to live, suffer and die on the streets, to freeze to death in bus shelters and alleyways, to die in overcrowded and inhumane shelters. Because we cannot rely on the Ford Administration, we must rely on one another, on our grassroots organizations and community support to challenge policy decisions that will kill us off through resistance, collaboration and support networks that move us towards a better world for our communities.
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