Adam Zivo: CBC ‘investigation’ misleads public on consumption sites 

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The CBC published an investigative story on July 5, suggesting that the closure of Ontario’s supervised consumption sites has been exacerbating the province’s overdose crisis. A broader look at the data, though, suggests that post-closure outcomes have actually been inconclusive or positive, and that the broadcaster is using cherry-picked figures to push activist propaganda.

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The story focused on overdose calls to paramedics in the first five months of 2026 and found that, on a year-over-year basis, such calls increased by 52 per cent in Ottawa, 115 per cent in Toronto, 199 per cent in Hamilton and 20 per cent in Thunder Bay.

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Although CBC cautioned that the “data doesn’t show what’s behind the increases,” the angle of the story was clear: around 80 per cent of the report was dedicated to discussing supervised consumption sites, and five harm reduction advocates were quoted arguing, to varying degrees, that closing these sites fuels overdose calls and deaths.

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No opposing voices were included, aside from a perfunctory quote from the provincial government, nor was there any mention of high-quality Canadian studies suggesting that consumption sites are ineffective. Any casual reader would’ve thus concluded that there is an urgent need to reopen these sites, which is unfortunate because the CBC’s framing is biased and the figures presented fail to account for context.

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Ontario began closing its supervised consumption sites at the end of March 2025: nine sites shut down that spring, a 10th was shuttered a few months later and then the province defunded its eight remaining sites this June. Most of the closed sites either have been, or soon will be, replaced by recovery-oriented addiction treatment centres known as “HART Hubs.”

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Did the first wave of closures worsen Ontario’s addiction crisis? The data here is inconclusive.

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The Toronto Overdose Information System shows that suspected opioid-related paramedic calls had been declining for about six months before these closures, but then steadily increased afterwards — a development which some harm-reduction activists find vindicating. Yet this data has often been taken out of context.

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While Toronto’s call volumes have been elevated in recent months, they still fit within the normal range established over the past few years and match what was normal throughout most of 2023 and 2024, when consumption sites were still widely operating. The recent surge is also not unprecedented, as a similar increase was observed in late 2022 and early 2023, around the zenith of the harm-reduction movement.

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It appears that harm-reduction activists —  and the CBC reporting on their claims — are cherry-picking data from early 2025, when overdose calls were unusually low, and using that as a baseline to misleadingly suggest that Toronto’s post-closure call volumes have been skyrocketing to unusually high levels.

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As for Ottawa, the CBC sent me the figures it based its claim of an increase in overdoses, which were originally sourced from the Ottawa Paramedic Service, and some issues were immediately apparent.

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The Ottawa data also lacks wider context as it covers only 2025 onward. However, it suggests that Ottawa’s overdose calls surged after March 2025 (following the first round of consumption site closures), peaked last September and then declined in late 2025 before rising again this April and May.

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These fluctuations suggest a more complicated story than what the CBC’s reporting suggests. What happened in Ottawa last September? Why did overdose calls decrease in late 2025? What confounding variables are at play here? These questions are not addressed by the CBC.

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To get more insight, I separately gathered overdose call data from the Ottawa Police Service (which uses a different system than the paramedics) and Ottawa Public Health’s data on opioid-related emergency room visits. I charted these figures from 2021 onward, with some gaps in recent months where data was unavailable.

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These sources show that overdose calls and opioid-related ER visits were very high throughout 2023 and most of 2024, and then declined to abnormally low levels in early 2025. Overdoses and ER visits subsequently surged after the first wave of consumption site closures, peaking in September, but then collapsed to levels far below 2023 and 2024 norms, largely reversing the post-closure increase.

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These findings refute the theory that closing supervised consumption sites caused a persistent rise in Ottawa’s overdoses. Even if the September spike was caused by these closures — which is not a given — it would appear that this harm was short-lived.

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In Thunder Bay, quarterly statistics published by the district’s health unit show that opioid-related overdose calls and opioid-related emergency room visits remained stable after the closure of the city’s sole consumption site. So there appears to be no significant overdose surge in that city, contrary to what the CBC’s report implied.

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Hamilton is an outlier, though. According to the city’s public health data, overdose reversal calls rose to unprecedented levels after the first wave of consumption site closures and have remained at volumes far above the post-pandemic norm. While this does not, by itself, establish causality, it is concerning and warrants further investigation.

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But what about fatal overdoses? It turns out that those did not increase at all.

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The CBC omitted this city-level data and only mentioned, in one brief sentence buried at the very end of the story, that province-wide opioid deaths had decreased by 41 per cent since the consumption sites were shut down. This is clearly misleading, considering how much of the report is devoted to quoting harm-reduction activists who claim that consumption sites save lives.

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In an email to National Post, CBC spokesman Chuck Thompson wrote that fatal overdoses were outside the scope of the story and that gathering consistent, up-to-date data on such deaths was not possible for all four cities.

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This is unconvincing. Even incomplete data would have provided much-needed context and would have been more substantial than the activist anecdotes that padded the CBC’s “investigation.”

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On a more fundamental level, none of this data can, by itself, convincingly demonstrate the utility (or lack thereof) of overdose prevention sites, because correlation does not equal causation. You cannot, for example, just assume that closing consumption sites caused Hamilton’s surge in overdose calls or Thunder Bay’s collapse in overdose deaths — other possible causes must first be ruled out.

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One way to do this is to compare jurisdictions that have overdose prevention sites (known as a “treatment group”) to similar ones that do not (known as a “control” group).

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This is precisely what Dimitra Panagiotoglou, an epidemiologist based at McGill University, did in two separate peer-reviewed studies published in 2022. She found that, in both British Columbia and Ontario, consumption sites had no apparent effect on hospitalizations or overdose mortality rates.

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Just this spring, another peer-reviewed study published in the academic journal Addiction found similar results in Alberta. The study tracked patient outcomes at two consumption sites operating in demographically similar cities: Red Deer and Lethbridge. After the Red Deer site closed, its patients saw, in comparison to the Lethbridge patients, no statistically significant increase in deaths, emergency room visits or “opioid-related emergency medical services (EMS) events.”

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As noted in a recent report by the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions, however, harm reduction activists often ignore such higher-quality research and rely on methodologically weaker studies to support their view.

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This dynamic is evidently playing out right now regarding Ontario’s closures.

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Thompson said that, “CBC News did not selectively include evidence supporting supervised consumption sites while omitting opposing research.” Yet it is a demonstrable fact that opposing research and voices were not included in the report. If the CBC conducted “extensive research,” as Thompson claimed, then that just makes this absence all the more conspicuous.

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I further asked Thompson whether the failure to include opposing experts was consistent with the CBC’s journalistic standards, which ostensibly require balance and impartiality. He did not answer the question directly, and merely recited the credentials of the quoted harm-reduction activists and mentioned that the province was contacted for comment.

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This story is consistent with previous CBC reporting on drug policy.

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Last autumn, the broadcaster produced a documentary in defence of Canada’s failed “safer supply” experiment. As with the July 5 story, the documentary exclusively featured harm-reduction advocates while marginalizing opposing addiction experts, in what amounted to a swipe against conservative critics of progressive drug activism.

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Similarly, in late 2023, the CBC interviewed two Vancouver-area families who testified that their daughters had developed crippling addictions due to diverted safer supply opioids,  but the CBC failed to broadcast any negative references to safer supply.

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The CBC has repeatedly demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to produce balanced journalism on the national addiction crisis. Its “investigative” work amounts to little more than politicized cheer-leading for radical harm-reduction activists.

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National Post

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