Anthony Furey: Toronto’s radical plan to turn all homeless shelters into drug sites

Homeless set up a tent city in George Hislop Park in downtown Toronto on Tuesday May 26, 2020. Veronica Henri/Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network

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The City of Toronto’s shelter system is still guided by radical policies that encourage the city to hire active drug addicts to staff their programs, push for drugs and drug kits to be provided in abstinence-based facilities and even require that all shelters with children residing in them provide drug services.

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A reasonable person would think that these sorts of wrongheaded policies, to the degree that they existed at all, would have been phased out by now. After all, the provincial Ford government has wisely moved to close public sector drug injection sites close to schools and daycares and is pivoting towards programs that push for treatment over maintaining addictions.

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Likewise, the general public and politicians across the country have recognized that we’ve gone too far in the direction of “harm reduction” — with the drug crisis only worsening, too many lives lost and our downtown neighbourhoods suffering from collateral damage.

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They recognize the need to swing back to common sense policies. But the same can’t be said of the City of Toronto, where its shelter services department is supposed to be guided by a truly shocking “ten point plan” written by staff from Toronto Public Health.

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When it comes to hiring drug addicts at facilities, the document says that: “Shelter programs should plan for the intentional integration of people who use drugs into their staff team.” Paid duties can include helping friends shoot up.

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Drug dealers are drawn to the vicinity of injection sites because that’s where they find their client base. If a shelter has active drug users employed on site, this suggests that even staff will be liaising with dealers.

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It’s this sort of twisted attitude that got us to the point where a staff member at the Leslieville drug site was criminally charged for helping a drug dealer when a young mother was killed in drug warfare crossfire as opposed to helping the actual victim.

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They also seem to want to ruin the chances of people to keep clean. “Abstinence-based shelters are an important option for some people in the shelter system with lived and living experience of drug use,” the guide notes. “While these programs may not directly provide the fullest spectrum of harm reduction services, they remain accountable for employing a harm reduction approach, ensuring that their residents who use drugs are enabled to do so in the safest ways possible.”

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An abstinence-based shelter would be one where people are not supposed to be doing drugs. They are abstaining. So, no, the people in these shelters should not be “enabled” to use them and yet here we have a city guidebook telling them to make it happen.