Opened in 2003, the Insite safe drug consumption site in Vancouver was the first of its kind in North America. In 2011, after the Conservative federal government tried to shut it down, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled Insite had a right to stay open. “The experiment has proven successful,” the court wrote in its decision. “Insite has saved lives and improved health without increasing the incidence of drug use and crime in the surrounding area.”
Fast forward 13 years and Pierre Poilievre — who has a strong chance of becoming prime minister — is promising to shut down “radical, wacko” “drug dens” like Insite.
Another opponent of the sites, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, is forcing 10 of Ontario’s 17 sites to close. Ford says it’s because the sites are too close to schools and daycares, but he’s refusing to let them reopen in different locations.
How has this shift happened since the 2010s? As always, there’s more to it than campaigning politicians would have you know.
Rise in homelessness & addiction
Many Canadians know that homelessness, addiction and overdose deaths have been on the rise for years. These issues have worsened under Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, with rent prices, food prices and the number of tent encampments all increasing.
Canada’s housing advocate notes that homelessness is caused by systemic failures across levels of government: weak rent controls, wages that don’t keep up with the cost of living, and the lack of public housing.
What’s unique about Poilievre is that he blames a few dozen safe consumption sites for these deeply rooted issues.
In his videos, Poilievre uses grainy images of tent encampments and shocking statistics about overdose deaths to argue that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have created “hell in Canada.”
He conflates safe consumption sites with other policies aimed at reducing overdose deaths, like safer supply. Safe consumption sites let people bring their own drugs to a safe environment where medical care is available in case of overdose. Safer supply, on the other hand, lets doctors prescribe medications that are safer than street drugs to people with addictions.
Both of these policies were created on the advice of public health professionals in response to rapidly rising overdose deaths. There are 29 organizations providing safer supply across Canada, mostly in British Columbia and Ontario, according to the federal government. And despite false claims in the National Post that there are safe consumption sites “in every small town” in B.C., there are just 39 of them across all of Canada.
Poilievre uses extreme rhetoric to falsely claim that these programs created homelessness and toxic drug crises. “This is a deliberate policy by woke Liberal and NDP governments to provide taxpayer-funded drugs, flood our streets with easy access to these poisons,” he said in one video shot in front of a tent encampment, which has been viewed more than 250,000 times.
Opioid crisis in the Trudeau era
Both the opioid crisis and the movement to build safe consumption sites started long before Trudeau came along.
It first started in the 1990s in response to drug overdose deaths. A small number of sites operated illegally for a few weeks at a time. One of those — Insite — became legally sanctioned in 2003.
More safe consumption sites opened after Trudeau came to power. His government supported the idea, so municipalities started building them.
Importantly, his election in 2015 also coincided with the early years of the opioid epidemic. Large numbers of Canadians first got hooked on prescription opioids in the early 2000s, but a crackdown on over-prescription around 2012 led to an influx of stronger, illicit opioids, research published in The Lancet says.
The number of deaths had also skyrocketed. In 2017, more than 1,400 British Columbians died from toxic drugs, up from 330 in 1993.
Poilievre cites the rise in overdose deaths as if Liberal drug policies created the crisis, when in fact these policies were created after the increase in deaths began.
Exaggeration & hyperfocus in the media
Opponents of safe consumption sites have also hyperfocused on one Toronto neighbourhood’s opposition to a site to discredit the entire concept.
In Leslieville last year, a mother was killed by a stray bullet outside a clothing store across the street from South Riverdale Community Health Centre (SRCHC), a three-storey building that includes a safe consumption site.
At a press conference, Poilievre falsely claimed the bullet had “come flying out” of the health centre. He repeated the falsehood in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
His social media posts about drug policy often rely on the work of National Post writers such as Adam Zivo.
Another writer whose work appears in the National Post, Derek Finkle, has called the area outside the SRCHC “an open-air drug emporium.” His writing has been published alongside photos of drugs, needles and people hanging out or even passed out in alleyways. Staff and service users of the Leslieville site have told The Grind that the photos, taken without subjects’ consent, feel like invasions of privacy. Finkle responded to messages from The Grind but did not say whether he had taken the photos in question. Editors at the Post did not respond to questions about the photos.
(Editor’s note, Dec 9, 2024: After publication of this article online, Finkle contacted The Grind to say he had not taken the photos. When asked again how the National Post came to have the photos, he would not specify.
Editor’s note, Dec 16, 2024: According to Finkle, residents had at times been encouraged by SRCHC staff, including the former CEO, to take photos of concerning incidents. A staffer at the SRCHC told The Grind that it is possible staff told local residents to include photos of needles or problematic behaviour outside the centre with their complaints, for internal use only. But under no circumstances would any staff have told neighbours to publish the photos in a national newspaper, the person said. We are not publishing their name as they are not authorized to speak to media.)
Finkle’s work has contributed to the drug policy panic across Canada. Zivo has based lengthy sections of his own National Post articles on Finkle’s work, including in one titled “Taxpayers are Funding Criminality at ‘Health Centre’ Drug Injection Sites.” Finkle has also been quoted in another Postmedia paper, the Toronto Sun, as a neighbour of the Leslieville site, drawing attention to perceived community safety concerns.
The South Riverdale site, which had its share of management issues, has now undergone multiple reviews: by a hospital network, a provincial appointee and the police. An empty space where people used to gather outside has been fenced off, security has been hired, and volunteers with a men’s group — some of whom use the consumption site themselves — sweep neighbouring streets for needles multiple times a week. On one needle sweep in October which The Grind went along for, not a single needle was found.
Finkle wrote in August that the announcement of the coming closure of the sites brought “long-overdue relief.”

Under Ford, users struggle to access treatment
Poilievre and Ford both say that the solution to these crises is addiction treatment. But the truth is that treatment is hard to come by and people who use opioids have an extremely high chance of relapsing after they go to rehab.
In Ontario, where Conservatives have been in power for six years, fentanyl users have told The Grind that it’s nearly impossible to get a bed in a medically supervised detox facility, which is often the first step to getting off drugs.
Allison Alexiou, a program manager at SRCHC, says she’s called the detox intake line hundreds of times for her clients who want to stop using. Only about 10 of these calls have been successful because there is such a lack of services.
She says governments need to fund both harm reduction policies and addiction treatment, instead of pitting the two approaches against each other.
“We don’t need either/or. We need all of it. We need [consumption sites]. We need addictions medicine. We need more detox beds. We need more housing. We need more basic needs funding in [Ontario Works] and
[disability]. We need more low-barrier access to health care. We need more community health services. We need everything.”
CORRECTION, Dec 6, 2024, 4:10 p.m.: The original edition of this article incorrectly stated that Derek Finkle called Leslieville “an open-air drug emporium” in the National Post. In his articles, he described only the area directly outside of the South Riverdale Community Health Centre in that way. We regret the error.
This article appeared in the 2024 Dec - 2025 Jan issue.