Let me begin with a matter of procedure.
It was announced a couple of weeks ago that Wellington County Council is looking at allowing their meetings to be recorded and broadcast, and I, for one, applaud their interest in joining the 21st century. It’s strange to me in this post-pandemic era that many Wellington townships have realized the possibilities or YouTube while the county government has not, but I digress.
It would be nice if this week’s Joint Social Services and Land Ambulance Committee were available for the public to watch in full because it laid bare the gross inadequacies of our social services system, and how our local government is hamstrung by a limited number of options to fix it.
Melissa Kwiatkowski, the CEO of the Guelph Community Health Centre, was on-hand to present the work that they and their partner organizations have been doing to apply for HART Hub funding. Now, the good news is that Guelph is not going to have to slug it out in a competitive bidding process to get that funding, but the bad news is that there’s still a lot of risk associated with this project, meaning the closure of the consumption and treatment site.
Now I hear some of you scoffing and rolling your eyes: There he goes again, sticking up for all those horrible junkies and degenerates! Yes, I’m aware of the crime stats, I go to the police board meetings too, but crime is a symptom of desperation and negligence, so to understand what’s happening with the police, you have to, in essence, start with social services.
So back to the joint committee, where Kwiatkowski did her best to turn lemons into lemonade.
The Guelph Hub will focus on youth and adults who are “medically complex”, answering their physical health, mental health and addiction treatment needs in order to get them stabilized and then moved on to the next level of care. An impressive list of a dozen local agencies has partnered with Community Health to make the Hub happen, but there are noticeable signs that this isn’t the transformational idea that the provincial government sold it to be.
For instance, it will be hard for Community Health to offer the full slate of HART Hub services in one location. It also doesn’t help that applicants aren’t allowed to buy new buildings or undertake major renovations to existing buildings. Guelph and other Hub locations are only getting funding for three years, and then only $1.3 million to set up the housing potion of the Hub, which is an amount of money that doesn’t really buy much housing.
Like all things cooked up in the bowels of Queen’s Park these days, nothing is permanent. Unless, of course, you’re going to sell provincial assets like the 407 or Ontario Place to foreign corporations.
But along with the upside, there’s a whole lot of downside. Establishing a HART Hub through Community Health means that the needle exchange and safe supply programs might not be allowed to co-locate there. So, along with the creation of a whole new bureaucracy, Community Health may have to play musical chairs with the successful programs they’ve already implemented.
And despite the claxon you hear in the public square, or the mayor’s social media feed, yes, these programs are working.
There have been 41,000 visits to the Guelph CTS, 1,000 referrals to primary care, 44 people every month have been connected to on-demand addiction treatment, and 311 drug poisonings have been reversed with only 12 then needing a follow-up visit to the ER. But the most impressive number is zero. Zero fatalities at the CTS.
On top of that, there are all the poisonings that never happened. A device at the CTS lets people test their drugs and see their content. The reason why the nomenclature has changed to say “drug poisoning” instead of “overdose” is because experienced users “overdose” not on the substance they think they are taking, but the other stuff that might be in it. This is why safer supply, or prescribed alternatives, has been so key to the prevention of deaths.
It's also worth noting that we don’t have to wait until April to start seeing the effects of the change in policy. Kwiatkowski said that attendance at the CTS has started to trend down as clients are internalizing the fact that the CTS will soon be out of business. This is on top of another health alert last week about nine substance-related poisonings in Guelph in the first four days of October, which paints a dire picture of what might be coming in the next few months.
This conversation fuelled more concern as the committee dug into paramedic services proper, and City of Guelph staff did not have a firm answer about what pressure will be exerted on the service when the CTS goes away. Unsurprisingly, this was unacceptable to many members of the committee on the County side who pressed Guelph staff to make, if nothing else, an educated guess.
Councillor Dave Anderson, the chair of the committee, was the most sympathetic to the desire of Public Services DCAO Colleen Clack-Bush to not paint a picture without knowing what it will look like, and Mayor Cam Guthrie agreed that there were still too many unknowns about what happens when Guelph transitions to the HART Hub.
As the old meme goes, “Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions.”
Barely two months ago it was Guthrie that was cheering the loudest about the closure of the CTS and its replacement by a HART Hub. Regardless of how you feel about the efficacy of the CTS, it was always a borderline negligent idea to eliminate an option that was saving livings and replacing it with one of the Ford government’s patented back-of-the-napkin plans in the span of about seven months.
And yet, while many municipalities and government officials are pushing back against this idea of closing CTSes, Guelph City Hall remains silent, throwing its weight behind teetotalling Nancy Reaganism. “Just say no,” indeed.
Following the meeting someone remarked on my coverage that the entire meeting was “jaw-dropping”, and I agree. Sadly, since streaming a council or committee meeting online is apparently more of a city thing, you’ll have to take my word for it: If you don’t like what’s going on with substance users in Guelph now, you’re really going to hate it when the CTS goes away.
