This week, a small but important argument for sanity and common sense was won by common people in a little neighbourhood just east of downtown Toronto. If readers followed the news, they may be confused, thinking the argument was bigger than one neighbourhood. Indeed, the Ford government announced that Ontario would close the 10 supervised consumption sites across the province that are within 200 metres of schools and childcare centres.
They also announced significant new investments in treatment and recovery right across the province to stem the worsening trends of addiction and death.
It was a big announcement, delivered at a big conference, and made big news. But the journey to get here was led by a group of people you’ve probably never heard of. Normal Canadians from all walks of life, with different skills, experiences, and definitely political views; diverse in every meaning of that word. The people who led this effort were united by the simplest of bonds: they’re neighbours. My neighbours.
This isn’t really my story to tell. I wasn’t one of the first, nor did I work the hardest or engage the most in the wake of Karolina Huebner-Makurat’s tragic death in July of 2023. She was hit by a stray bullet shot near our local drug den, run out of the South Riverdale Community Health Centre (SRCHC). I wasn’t the face of the neighbourhood in countless meetings with police or politicians, or in the demoralizing gaslighting sessions organized by well-funded activists who were feigning “consultation.”
I wrote a little, publicly and privately, trying to share the craziness of what I saw, and the determination of the wildly impressive neighbours I was meeting and getting to know. I offered my neighbours a little advice and insight into the people and processes at various levels of government, which usually amounted to pouring the cold water of cynicism onto the optimistic suggestions of good, normal people who thought the big people with big titles would listen to evidence, and reason, and to them.
I remember telling a friend in the Ontario government that he didn’t understand these people, my neighbours. They weren’t going to stop, weren’t going to be placated by limp investigations or vague PR around obviously insufficient improvements.
My cynicism from years of working in and around politics eased a little this week. Not because I think better of the system of bureaucrats, pundits, activists and politicians who hold dominion over far too much of our lives. No, my cynicism has lessened because in Leslieville I saw the power of common, average Canadians who told the truth and told it relentlessly.
So much of politics is about big abstract arguments and ideas, and the drug crisis is a perfect microcosm of that reality. A large and influential pro-drug activist class has been built, arguing that as more people die we are actually saving more lives. As more addicts are created with ever more drugs being pushed into the streets, they tell us the “evidence-based policy” demonstrates that all the evidence we see every day is wrong.
For a long time, in far too many places, the activists were winning. They captured institutions, and their obviously false arguments became conventional wisdom in ministries of health and in the media. As everything got worse, they told us their plan was working—we just needed to do more of it, spend more money on it, and do it harder.
The well-credentialed leaders of our public health institutions co-opted language, adopting doublespeak to tell us not to believe our own eyes. The same people who have successfully implemented policies to stigmatize smoking and sugary sodas told us that when it came to the most dangerous and addictive poisons known to man, wreaking havoc on lives and communities right across the country, destigmatization was essential.
Facing abstract ideas and a barrage of media who ignored them and misinformed their readers about what was really happening in Leslieville, my neighbours responded again and again with the simple, common sense truth we all saw, every day, with our own eyes. They would not be lied to, and would not lie to themselves.
Not a single local elected member in our neighbourhood supported us, not really. Some listened, many didn’t. But even when they listened, it was clear from the outset they didn’t intend to change course. Neither did my neighbours.
Passers-by stop to look at a makeshift memorial at the place where a mother of two, Karolina Huebner-Makurat was killed by a stray bullet, in Toronto, July 10, 2023. Chris Young/The Canadian Press.
They filed lawsuits, wrote articles, documented crimes and broken rules, and reported them relentlessly to everyone, media, police and politicians alike. They saw through the smokescreen of incremental half-measures meant to feign consultation and safety and kept pushing. They prepared for the renewal application of the SRCHC’s consumption license, which was coming this November.
Mercifully, that next fight was won before it began. At long last this week, the premier of Ontario listened to facts and reason and to the relentless voices of Canadians from every walk of life in our neighbourhood who spoke to him not in abstractions and big arguments, but with common sense, facts, and the plain language of parents concerned about their kids.
The facts were, as my neighbour Derek Finkle reported this week in the National Post: in the neighbourhoods around these sites, there were “76 per cent higher reports of break and enter, 40 per cent more shootings, 97 per cent more robberies and 45 per cent greater reports of homicide.” Our neighbourhood was less safe because of the drug den in our midst.
The fact was that the new rule that prevents government-funded drug dens from operating within 200 metres of schools and childcare centres is a rule that already applies to retail cannabis stores. It would be lunacy to argue that drug dens deserve looser regulations than retail cannabis stores, but the “experts” and activists argued it anyway.
Abstract arguments about “the realities of urban density” tried to paper over the fact that four schools and childcare centres are within 150 metres of the SRCHC drug den at the biggest intersection in our little neighbourhood and the children and families of our neighbourhood are less safe as a result.
It’s been a long road, and my neighbours aren’t declaring victory. The activists are too entrenched and fervent to give up. They still have the municipal and federal government on their side (for now), and much of the provincial health bureaucracy as well.
The pro-drug PR machine was out spinning immediately this week, using their (mercifully not long for this world) ideological allies at the CBC to announce a “scoop” (which Derek Finkle had reported a day earlier) that the Ford government “ignored its own experts” in closing the Leslieville drug den.
An interim injection site has opened inside Toronto Public Health’s offices at Dundas and Victoria St. in Toronto, August 21, 2017. Cole Burston/The Canadian Press.
It’s true that the whitewash investigation emanating from Ontario’s Provincial Health Department did not recommend closing the site. That was a foregone conclusion. But it was an unreasonable and dishonest one. I encourage readers to read that report. Does it capture the story I’ve just told? Do you see in it the thousands of examples of crime, danger, violence, and death, provided by the concerned families of our neighbourhood to the investigators?
The report reads like what it is: propaganda designed to change nothing, fix nothing, and keep our neighbourhood on a path for more crime and chaos. The report even contains an admonition against those neighbours whose increasingly necessary security cameras captured so much crime and rule-breaking over the past year, much of it passed on to the so-called investigators.
Rather than admitting the evidence they received, the report chastises us, and says the security footage presents “an educational opportunity for community members in terms of how security cameras are used and privacy issues concerning the use of private security cameras.”
Premier Ford listened to the actual experts on what’s going on in Leslieville this week: the families who live here, the parents who raise kids here, the hard-working people who no longer feel safe commuting on our streetcars or walking our streets at night.
At some point in the next year or so, the rest of the country will have the opportunity to make a similar choice in a federal election. They can vote for continued governance by experts who gaslight them, causing harm while they claim to be reducing it. Or, Canadians can vote for a government that listens to the common sense of common people and begins to clean up some of the mess of crime, chaos, and death the well-credentialled, pro-drug wackos have wrought on neighbourhoods beyond Leslieville, right across the country. The voters of this country get to decide the direction of Canada, we have not delegated our sovereignty to a cadre of activist bureaucrats.
It’s easy to be cynical about politics. Much of the past year in our neighbourhood has been incredibly frustrating, as our voices were tuned out by so many of those in power and we suffered the indignity of being ignored. We’ve persevered through endless Kafkaesque cul-de-sacs of bureaucratic nonsense, been screamed at by activists, insulted in the media, and accused of not caring about the lives of those suffering from addiction.
And in spite of all that—and because they do care, and care deeply—my relentless, normal, busy, hard-working, and heroic neighbours in Leslieville kept pushing for what they knew was right. And at least for now, they secured a small but important win for common sense.
“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it,” says G.K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man. Against the mighty stream of conventional wisdom, power, money, and pro-drug orthodoxy, my neighbours stood up and fought vigorously against it. Our neighbourhood is very much alive, and I am proud to call each of the everyday heroes who fought the good fight, my neighbours.
