The operators of an Ontario supervised drug site have launched a legal challenge against the province’s new law to shut them down, arguing that the decision is a breach of Charter rights.
The Neighbourhood Group Community Services, located in Toronto, and two site users, filed a challenge against the Ontario government with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Tuesday in response to the Community Care and Recovery Act.
The recently passed law permits the closure of 10 of the 23 supervised drug consumption sites across the province that are located within 200 metres of daycares or schools.
The Ontario government said it was in response to parental concerns over community safety, giving the sites until March to relocate.
“Communities, parents, and families across Ontario have made it clear that the presence of drug consumption sites near schools and daycares is leading to serious safety concerns,” said a spokesperson for Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones in a statement.
“We’ve heard from families of the harassment, verbal and physical assault they have experienced walking their child to daycare or school. We have also heard about the phone calls parents have received that their child has picked up a dirty needle, or bag of toxic drugs in the school yard.”
The law also prevents municipalities from applying for new sites through the federal government for exemptions, effectively stopping any new sites from opening.
The legal challenge argues that these closures violate sections 7, 12 and 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantee the right to life, liberty, and security of the person; protect Canadians from cruel and unusual punishment; and guarantee the right to be free from discrimination.
Additionally, it argues that the province’s decision is in violation of the Constitution because only the federal government has the authority to implement criminal law or “suppress conduct that it deems to be socially undesirable.”
However, criminal lawyer Ari Goldkind argues that Canada’s constitution wasn’t referring to supervised consumption sites when enshrining said rights.
“There is no Section 7 violation, 12, or 15 violation,” Goldkind told True North. “Nobody is shutting down these sites, which have been shown, on the evidence, to be of limited value, or even worse, and which certainly render communities that they’re in indisputably worse.”
The challenge claims that preliminary data from Toronto Public Health reported 523 people died last year as a result of opioid toxicity in Toronto, an increase of 74% compared to 2019 and that consumption sites can remediate such overdoses.
The Association of Municipalities of Ontario also released a policy paper which found overdose deaths fell by 42% since these sites were implemented, alleging that no overdoses have occurred at the Toronto location for the past five years.
However, Goldkind argues that the Ford government is simply “moving them away from children and parents, and giving the same rights that the applicants claim for themselves,” which protects the “rights of others, particularly school age kids and their parents.”
The province also pledged nearly $400 million to create 19 new intensive addiction recovery facilities to replace the 10 consumption sites slated to close by March 31.
The new spaces, which will combine addiction recovery with 375 “highly supportive” housing units, have been granted a $378 million budget.
“It’s a perfectly acceptable and responsible tradeoff, and, again, what a democratically elected government is supposed to do,” said Goldkind. “By no means is it cruel and unusual to move the sites a bit away from schools and daycares, that argument should hold little merit, if any, upon close and exacting scrutiny, let alone on its obvious face. If the Charter covers this, then it truly is like ketchup, and can be spread over anything. And that would be a very bad thing indeed.”