Mayor John Tory and Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins are asking Health Canada to “immediately” approve the establishment of a temporary supervised injection site that would be able to accommodate the users of a pop-up facility that was set up in Moss Park this past summer.
In the letter Tory and Hoksins say that the facility, located in a tent in Moss Park, has saved lives but is “not sustainable not least because winter is approaching.”
They say that the nearby Fred Victor Centre has agreed to have a temporary supervised injection facility placed in its facility but needs an exemption from Health Canada to move forward.
“The Fred Victor Centre is submitting an exemption application to your office this week, and we urge your expedited approval to assist in our response to this emergency health issue in Toronto,” the letter asks. “We appreciate you have an established approval process that usually takes several weeks. Under the circumstances and the urgency of this local situation, we ask that you provide a short-term or conditional exemption to enable the service to open as soon as possible.”
The letter from Tory and Hoskins was written on the same day that the volunteer group who run the pop-up facility at Moss Park issued a news release, calling on the city to help them find a suitable location for the winter.
According the release, volunteers at the Moss Park site have witnessed 1,976 injections since the site opened on Aug. 12 and have stopped or reversed 85 overdoses, including a record 48 during the month of October. The release said that volunteers have also distributed 1,246 Naloxone kits, which can be used to reverse the effects of an overdose.
“We demand the city and province take immediate action to support the sustainability of the Moss Park overdose prevention site,” the release said. “The city must work with us to procure a nearby indoor space with electricity, running water, a bathroom, and heat as soon as possible. Until then, the city should assist us in procuring a temporary construction trailer and a place to put it in the immediate vicinity.”
In their release, the volunteers who operate the Moss Park site said that there was initially a plan to move the facility into the basement of the Fred Victor Centre but they claimed that the plan fell through due to “the same forces of bureaucracy and official indifference that have already contributed to so many preventable deaths.”
The city has already opened a supervised temporary injection facility at its Victoria Street building ahead of the opening of three permanent sites which are still under construction.
