Overwhelmed by the opioid crisis, the council is asking for help

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The City of Ottawa wants to add its voice to a call to the federal and provincial governments to do more to help cities fight the triple crisis of homelessness, mental health and opioid addiction.

“We can spend all the money in the world. We can throw money at shelters. We can throw money at the police. We can throw money at places of consumption (of consumption). We need more legislative and jurisdictional tools and we need more hospital investments to target that,” said Rideau-Vanier Coun. Stephanie Plante.

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Council will vote Wednesday on a motion by Plante to support the Big City Ontario Caucus of Mayors’ “Solve the Crisis” campaign, which is urging the provincial and federal governments to step up and address the mental health bottleneck , addiction and homelessness.

Drug overdoses claimed more than 3,400 lives in Ontario last year and left 234,000 people homeless. About 1,400 tent camps have sprung up in the province, according to the mayors of the Big City.

“If you talk to Royal Ottawa, they’re completely overwhelmed,” Plante said. “If you talk to smaller cities (Cobourg, Kingston, Prescott-Russell), they’re literally telling people ‘Go to Ottawa’ because they don’t have the resources to deal with it.”

In addition to “adequate and sustained funding,” the motion calls for the province to form a task force that includes municipalities, health care providers, first responders, the business community and the tourism industry to develop a “plan of action taken in Ontario” to address the problem. topic

How to approach the problem is sure to be controversial. A recent history of QP Briefing says Big City mayors will debate this week whether to ask for more power to deal with homeless encampments and for higher levels of government to develop a “mandatory and supportive treatment program” to deal with addiction.

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Mandatory treatment is not part of Plante’s movement.

“I think we all know the status quo isn’t working,” he said. “I think the one thing that nobody says is that when you talk to people who have been in treatment, nobody wakes up one day and says, ‘Hey, I’m going to go to treatment.’ It will be fantastic. Usually, there’s some precipitating event like a judge, doctor, family member, or big scare that makes someone go “Woah.” I better go to treatment.

“I would say that there are some people ideologically who see it as something that must be forced. But there is no treatment for them. I think one thing we can all agree on is we need more of it.”

Addiction of any kind wreaks “chaos” on lives, and that chaos has spilled onto the street and into affluent neighborhoods beyond downtown, he said. That’s what brought the issue to the fore, he said.

“Nobody was writing about public housing takeovers in Lowertown or drug dealers recruiting kids at York Street Public School,” he said.

“I refuse to believe there are people walking across Ontario who haven’t been touched personally or professionally by addiction. It’s a family member. It’s in your neighborhood. It’s in your workplace. Even (the first minister) Doug Ford has dealt with it.”

The Caucus of Mayors of the Great City will debate on Thursday about its policy to solve the crisis.

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