My child attends a public school that is being used as an excuse to shut down the Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site (KMOPS).
At the same time, the 7-Eleven convenience store my child walks by on her way to school at College and Spadina, located right by the mental health hospital, is set to be converted, like all 7-Elevens in Ontario, into a cheap bar that not only sells takeout alcohol but allows consumption with “food.”
None of this is anything that the community has asked for, or that makes sense for our dense, complex neighbourhood. Downtown families don’t appreciate being used as pawns in an anti-public health, anti-harm-reduction agenda.
It isn’t rocket science that decisions about land use and public space sometimes need to be made at a level below that of the entire province. To some rural or suburban voters, I can see it making sense that elementary schools be further away from social services targeting drug users.
But our little neighbourhood is so dense that in the immediate area of the school there are: several walk-in clinics and pharmacies, a drop-in centre supporting homeless people, two encampments, innumerable bars, churches, synagogues, alleys and convenience stores. Here, 200 metres of city block contains multitudes.
Closing down the safe injection site is likely to cause more completely unsupervised drug use in the alleys and streets and stairwells which are right by the school and on the way where kids walk.
To blame the drug problem on the social services keeping drug users healthier and connecting to services is asinine, and goes against every public health study on the topic.
But this isn’t about keeping kids safe or happy. It’s about political theatre — pandering to voters who see the downtown as a cesspool and can’t imagine why families and children would even live here.
No one has cared about our kids’ needs all summer. Bellevue Park, our local park with a playground, had no functioning bathrooms all season, no drinking water, and no splash pad in the heat. The encampment outside a nearby church (and supported by the church) was evicted by the city, and people who had nowhere to go moved to Bellevue Park. They set up by the playground, a much less suitable or well-managed area.
A couple of people had been living in the park for some time before that, in the south east corner, not affecting the playground area.
The lack of clean water increased intoxication levels and petty violence in the area as well.
Instead of fixing the bathrooms or installing a suitable temporary alternative, the city dropped one porta-potty, later adding two more. One of the porta-potties is supposedly an accessible model, except that they installed it right by a curb, adding a step.
They were cleaned on an inadequate schedule and were not only unusably disgusting, but the smell of shit and vomit and god knows what else would waft through the park if the wind was blowing the wrong way, right onto the patio of the nearby Portuguese restaurant where people would be trying to eat.
Families — tough downtown families — began to avoid the park. No one in the provincial or municipal governments cared or did anything for our kids all summer.
From what I’ve seen, city councillor Dianne Saxe, responsible for Kensington Market as well as Rosedale and the Annex, does not give a shit about the Market. She seems to be making policy decisions to punish the Market and to thwart attempts to address community issues, such as her repeated attacks on the encampment that was supported by community members, including Reverend Maggie Helwig at Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields church. Calls and emails to her office have gone unanswered.
The local business improvement area hired local residents to clean up the park regularly. So despite the smell of shit from the porta-potties, the regular cleaning and the availability of a safe disposal container for used drug paraphernalia meant that my kid and I never even saw one used needle this year.
Zach, who lives in the Bellevue Park encampment in the centre of the Market, goes to KMOPS for harm reduction supplies.
He says, “I get stem kits and ball kits. I don’t use these as much myself, but other people come here [to my tent] and get this stuff. I often go three times a day to refresh the supplies.” He adds that people who are addicted “gotta do it somewhere. It’s better people know what you’re doing and how you are doing it, so you don’t do it in the bathroom. That’s how people die.”
There was recently a community solidarity protest in support of the safe injection site, attended by hundreds of people, including other parents from my local school and many people who have raised kids in this community. And we have kids in our community who have lost parents to street life or to overdose. If parents can get access to harm reduction, they have a better chance of coming home to their kids someday.
Drug users are not isolated from the rest of society, especially in our neighbourhoods, and their health affects the rest of us. Access to clean needles and other paraphernalia prevents the spread of infectious disease and means that people can dispose of their needles safely.
We can all see the hypocrisy of Ontario Premier Doug Ford in putting forward these policies — a man whose own brother smoked crack while also being a father and the literal mayor of this city.
In the industry I work in, construction, we have the highest overdose rates of employed people. Lots of these people are also parents. I don’t want the government to use our kids as pawns in blanket prohibitions against needed public services while also not giving a shit about the real problems our community faces.
This article appeared in the 2024 Oct/Nov issue.
