By: Overdose Prevention Ottawa (March 24, 2026)
The Ontario Conservative government’s decision to defund supervised consumption sites across Ontario is not a health policy; it is a death sentence by legislation. By withdrawing support from seven sites, including those in Ottawa, Toronto, St. Catharines, and London, the Conservative government is choosing ideology over evidence, and punishment over care. This announcement follows the forced closure of nine supervised consumption sites across Ontario in 2025 after this government presented community health centres with an impossible choice: accept HART Hub funding, conditional on abandoning harm reduction services entirely, or receive nothing at all.
When you close these doors, you do not end drug use.
Ottawa’s two remaining safe consumption sites, serving over a thousand people a week, will be shut down in the coming weeks. We already know what happens when these sites close. The closure of Sudbury’s supervised consumption site was not merely a loss of services. It was an act of structural violence, a policy decision that researchers have since documented as creating ‘death worlds’ for people who use drugs . The findings are stark: closures force unsafe consumption, erode social connectedness, and expose already marginalized neighbours to heightened risk of overdose and physical harm. These are not unintended consequences. They are entirely foreseeable. When you close SCS doors, you do not end drug use. You end the networks of care that keep people alive.
Conservatives are not solving a crisis through these cuts; they are relocating it and amplifying it. These closures will move people who use drugs from spaces designed to keep them alive, onto our streets, into our public transit, into shelters, parks, and apartment stairwells. They are moving potentially fatal opioid poisonings and overdoses from a room with a nurse to a public washroom with no one. This means that when the next overdoses happen, there will be no trained peer, no nurse, no naloxone, no oxygen tank, and no second chances. There will only be a body, and a system that chooses fatal punishment. And in doing so, the Ontario Government is choosing a future where more people die alone.
The conservative government claims to prioritize “treatment, recovery, and safer communities” through its HART hubs . But this is a false choice, and a false binary. You cannot force recovery by removing the option to stay alive. Supervised consumption sites are not obstacles to treatment, they are the front door to it. Harm-reduction is not a service in lieu of treatment – it is one of many public health interventions. They are often the only place where a person who uses drugs can access primary care, build trust, and eventually, if they can, begin to improve the conditions of their lives. The nature of low-barrier services is a form of care like no other that exists as an entry point for people to begin rebuilding trust with healthcare workers.
The vilification of safe consumption sites as sources of disorder ignores the reality that they reduce public drug use, discarded needles, and strain on emergency services. To close them in the name of “public safety” is a contradiction so profound, it’s dishonest and cruel. And once again, the conservative government escapes accountability for its own sabotage of the health care system. By refusing to properly fund a network of smaller, community-based sites, they engineered the very instability they now cite as grounds for elimination, which they will leverage for more police, more criminalization, more trauma and fewer spaces where people can simply be who they are.
This pattern is tragically familiar. Cutting harm reduction does not save costs. It increases them. When people lose access to harm reduction supplies and supervised consumption services, preventable infections surge, shifting costs downstream to hospitals, emergency rooms and to the coroners. Defunding these sites does not just endanger the people who use them. It floods paramedics and first responders with preventable overdose calls, pulling resources away from the rest of the community.
Harm reduction will always be vulnerable to political backlash so long as drug possession remains a crime. That is a federal responsibility, and it is a federal failure. Let us be honest: the province could not defund a health service if the criminal law had not already done its work. If it had not already taught us to see people who use drugs not as human beings deserving of healthcare, but as criminals deserving of shame and punishment. The province is merely executing what the federal government has already justified: that some lives are unworthy of saving. The province wields the knife, the federal government set the table, and together, they have codified dehumanization as policy.
We demand the reversal of the policy decision to end access to supervised consumption in our community, and in solidarity with communities across Ontario. We demand a health policy rooted in evidence, compassion, and the fundamental belief that every person, housed or unhoused, in recovery or using drugs, deserves the right to life.
l Capital Commission and the City of Ottawa are now saying that because of this fire we are no longer allowed to make this place our home. They are using this attack to force us to disperse and displace us into the dangers of isolation. We have nowhere else to go.
Overdose Prevention Ottawa 
