Northern Ontario communities compete for limited number of funded HART hubs

There are at least six applications in northern Ontario to host Homelessness and Addictions Recovery Treatment (HART) hubs funded by the province.

In August, Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced the province would set aside $378 million to run 19 HART Hubs — 10 are due to open by next winter.

In the same announcement, Jones said Ontario would ban supervised drug consumption sites located within 200 metres of schools and child-care centres.

That means 10 supervised consumption sites across Ontario will have to shutter their doors by March 2025. 

Jones said the HART hubs will offer drug treatment and recovery services, along with on-site referral to shelter and transitional housing services.But they won't have supervised consumption services, and won't be a place where people can access a safe drug supply.

"Continuing to enable people to use drugs is not a pathway to treatment," said Jones at a press conference in August.

She added that communities losing supervised consumption sites will get priority when the province chooses where to locate the 19 HART hubs.

In northern Ontario, the cities of Sudbury, North Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Timmins and Thunder Bay have all applied to receive funding for one of the 19 sites. Communities in the East Algoma region have also banded together for an application to have a site in the small city of Elliot Lake.

Mary Margaret Fuller, executive director of the Counselling Centre of East Algoma, said the application would serve around 35,000 people spread out along the north shore of Lake Huron.

"As much as mayors speak about the larger centres struggling, and that is absolutely true, it is also absolutely true in smaller communities and in rural communities," she said.

"And so we need the local resources to be able to support those individuals and to create the prevention, as well as the intervention and the aftercare for those individuals."

Thunder Bay currently has a supervised consumption site that will close by March due to its proximity to a school. That would give it priority to receive $6.3 million in annual funding from the province to run a HART hub.

Both Sudbury and Timmins had supervised consumption sites but they closed their doors due to a lack of funding in March and August, respectively.

Timmins Mayor Michelle Boileau said her city started brainstorming around ideas similar to the HART hubs a few years ago.