In a move that has left staff at the Spot “despondent,” Greater Sudbury city council members voted 9-2 against continued municipal funding for The Spot, Sudbury’s supervised consumption site.
During a 2024/25 municipal budget meeting Dec. 18, Ward 11 Coun. Bill Leduc tabled a motion asking the city to provide $450,000 to keep the supervised consumption site open until the end of July 2024.
Only Ward 12 Coun. Joscelyne Landry-Altmann supported his effort.
The expenditure would have included a net 2024 tax levy impact of $194,500, with the balance taken from an anticipated year-end surplus from the 2023 amount budgeted for the facility.
(Staff shortages and shortened operating hours resulted in an under expenditure.)
And though Amber Fritz, manager of supervised consumption services told Sudbury.com they would not be backing down, she said the lack of municipal funding is a “huge letdown.”
“We understand that funding consumption sites and funding health care is a provincial responsibility, that's been said, ad nauseam, we got that,” said Fritz on Dec. 19. “But the fact of the matter is that the province is not providing funding right now. And they're not likely to do it anytime soon. So past Jan. 31, we have absolutely no idea what's going to happen to the people that rely on this place.”
The city has been funding the site’s operations on a temporary basis since September 2022, which was only meant to last until the province stepped up to the plate. With health care under provincial jurisdiction, municipal funding was intended as a stop-gap.
The Spot has an annual operating budget of approximately $1,374,000 and is operated by Réseau ACCESS Network.
Initially slated to close by the end of the year, Vale Base Metals recently made a $75,000 donation to keep the site open for the month of January.
“It's really painful to think that in the dead of winter, that this place could shut down completely,” Fritz said.
When the site was first proposed, it was in reaction to a report executed by the Public Health Sudbury and District (PHSD) Community Drug Strategy.
Endeavouring to find what would best mitigate the opioid crisis and the number of deaths from substance use, the report also showed the impact the site could have on first responders, as well as the costs associated with emergency department visits and paramedic responses.
From January to November of this year, there were 343 visits to emergency departments in the Sudbury and Manitoulin districts for confirmed opioid overdoses. In the same period last year, there were 419 visits to emergency departments in the Sudbury and Manitoulin districts for confirmed opioid overdoses.
Again this year, January to November, Greater Sudbury Paramedic Services responded to 604 suspected opioid-related incidents. For the same period in 2022 ambulances responded to 661 suspected opioid-related incidents.
Between Sept. 28, 2022, and Aug. 31 (the opening of The Spot and the last date of a recent study) a total of 470 unique clients accessed supervised consumption services, representing 1,181 total visits and 1,605 total consumptions. The Spot reversed a total of 20 overdose (toxic poisoning) events, and no overdose required emergency medical services.
And though Fritz said she can’t deny how important the numbers and data points are it “overshadows the community and the love and the connection that is fostered here.”
“That stuff like that isn't reflected in data, what happens here, person-to-person, every day,” she said. “There's no way to capture that just by throwing a bunch of numbers on a page. So when people talk about the number of visits, it's really reducing people and their humanity to numbers. I think that's doing an incredible disservice to members of this community. “
She adds that even if the data points were better, that might not save them. “It didn’t save Timmins.”
Safe Health Site Timmins will run out of funding on Dec. 31, and according to their latest numbers, they had 2,189 visits to their site in November alone. Between July of 2022 and June of this year, SHST had 24,168 visits and reversed 130 overdoses.
Fritz said that there is a sense of fear among those who use the services of The Spot, but they are grateful for one month more, courtesy of Vale Base Metals. Fritz said she hopes that other private industry sectors might step in and “adopt the spot” for a month.
“But also, this is a health care service, which is the responsibility of the province, so I am a little horrified that we have come to a place where private industry is having to step in to fund health care,” said Fritz. “Is that where we're at in this province? Apparently, it is in Sudbury, and if that doesn't scare people, it probably should.”
In any event, said Fritz, “We're gonna keep moving forward with advocacy. We're going to keep really encouraging anyone that is in a position where they can provide funding to The Spot for a month to to keep a life saving service open,” she said. “Because despite the barriers or location and the lack of inhalation services and not being open for as many hours as we would like to be: our visits are increasing every month,” she said. “And the more people are connected to this place and the longer we're open and operational, the more community that's built, the more lives can be saved.”
Jenny Lamothe covers vulnerable and marginalized communities for Sudbury.com.
