A group of “safe supply” advocates accused the Ontario government of being motivated by “supremacist” ideologies and benefitting from the deaths of minorities in response to Premier Doug Ford’s ban on drug injection sites near schools.
During a meeting of drug policy groups intervening in the Charter challenge of Ontario’s injection sites law, one Toronto activist group levied extreme criticisms against the law designed to prevent children from being exposed to such facilities.
A coalition of drug policy organizations held an online briefing Thursday to discuss its role as interveners in a Superior Court of Justice Charter challenge of Ford’s Community Care and Recovery Act.
One of the speakers at the meeting, Zoë Dodd, a co-organizer at Toronto Overdose Prevention Society, accused Ford’s government of “deliberately misleading” Ontarians into believing that there is no toxic drug death crisis. She said the government wants to see people die from the closures of the sites.
“The government has made a choice to let people die because they are married to eugenicist and supremacist ideologies, which we don’t talk enough about in this country, but it is in their benefit to see people die,” she said. “And then the treatment system itself has not expanded to actually support people.”
The Act would ban “safe drug consumption sites” from operating or being established within 200 metres of locations such as school zones and restrict municipalities and local boards from authorizing such sites. It would also prevent organizations from petitioning Health Canada to create exemptions to provincial drug laws.
The Act, which received royal assent in Dec. 2024, will lead to the closure of 10 supervised drug consumption sites in Ontario.
The Charter challenge from the Neighbourhood Group Community Services argues that the Act violates Sections 7, 12 and 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The coalition of drug policy groups contends that the removal of those sites violates drug users’ right to “security of the person,” protection against “cruel and unusual treatment,” and “discriminates” against their substance use-related disability.
Both Dodd and Ford did not respond to True North’s requests for comment following the meeting. Ford’s PC government, however, has vowed to increase spending on housing and recovery programs to deal with the drug crisis while slashing the province’s safe injection and supply sites.
At the start of the meeting organized by Canada Drug Policy Coalition, Jessica Hannon, the communications director for the group, started by saying drug laws in Canada were “explicitly and vocally” made as a means to “control and subjugate Indigenous and racialized people.”
She alleged that the laws continue to this day to harm minorities as well disproportionately.
The group did not take True North’s questions at the meeting or respond to follow-up requests for comment. The group’s website, however, delved into the claim that Canada’s drug laws were designed to subjugate non-whites.
It said that the first drug laws in Canada were enacted after race riots in Vancouver against Chinese immigrants who were at the time accused of flooding the community with opium.
In 1908, after meeting with anti-opium reformer groups like the Chinese Anti-Opium League, a group made up of mostly Chinese immigrants opposed to opium, deputy labour minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, under Liberal Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier, helped create an anti-opium trafficking law.
The group insinuated that because the majority of black market opium traffickers at the time in Vancouver were Chinese immigrants, the law was designed to target Chinese men. And that the majority of Canadians using legal medical opium were white.
King, who later became Canada’s 10th prime minister, said that Chinese groups he conversed with on the subject noted that almost as much opium was sold to white people, including young people, as was the Chinese population.
“To be indifferent to the growth of such an evil in Canada would be inconsistent with those principles of morality which ought to govern the conduct of a Christian nation,” he said, informing his decision to ban the practice.
There were laws at the time, however, that did target the Chinese immigrant population, such as the “Chinese Head tax,” which both Conservative and Liberal governments held to discourage Chinese immigration in a bid to preserve the dominant culture.
In a report on the opium trade in 1908 King expressed that “there is no doubt” that the presence of Opium smoking in Canada was due to Chinese immigration in Vancouver.
But there was no mention affirming the claim that the law was enacted with the “explicit and vocal” purpose of “controlling and subjugating” non-whites, as Hannon claimed in the meeting.
Ontario’s supervised drug consumption sites are set to be closed by the end of March. According to the Canada Drug Policy Coalition, the groups will intervene in the Charter challenge of Ford’s act on March 23-24.