Ontario premier Doug Ford and his PC government’s latest policy announcement will kill drug users. That’s not hyperbole. It’s the logical endpoint of their choice to close safe consumption sites within 200 metres of a school. This, functionally, translates to shutting down 10 provincial sites, with five of them being in Toronto. Provincial Minister of Health Sylvia Jones announced that they will also limit the creation of future sites by preventing municipalities from making requests to the federal government for new locations directly.

These facilities save lives. During my time at the Investigative Journalism Bureau, my colleagues and I reported on a study published in The Lancet that found overdose deaths were reduced by 67 per cent in neighbourhoods within 500 metres of supervised consumption sites. This effect was felt up to five kilometres from these services.

Since then, even more studies have shown the dire state of the drug crisis in this country — one that surveyed opioid-related deaths in nine provinces and territories over three years. Deaths in that period more than doubled, hitting 6222 in 2021 from 3007 in 2019.

I am by no means an expert, but those who study and report on the drug crisis have been sounding the alarm. Multiple pieces have been published on how public officials have been ignoring experts on drug treatment. Journalist Manisha Krishnan, who has been covering drugs and the opioid crisis for years, wrote on the policy’s disastrous results in the Toronto Star. 

“If they continue to let drug users die at this shameful pace, while ignoring or eliminating solutions we know save lives, it will become harder and harder to believe that’s not what they actually want,” she writes.

At this point, it’s safe to assume that Ford and his government are content with their policies killing Ontarians. Moves like this that are concretely shown to result in people’s deaths constitutes a knowing act of social murder.

Social murder was coined by philosopher Friedrich Engels in his 1845 work “Condition of the Working Class in England.” Engels describes when society creates conditions to put workers in a position that leads to an early and avoidable death, that the societal structures and political figures that created these conditions are guilty of social murder. 

“[It] does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offense is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.”

Ford and his provincial policies that commit social murder didn’t begin with the shuttering of safe consumption sites.

Earlier this month, The Trillium reported that the government’s internal estimates of homeless people in the province hovered around 234,000. Even though the government has walked back the number, the crisis still remains dire, with the number of unhoused people, at least in Toronto, in the tens of thousands. 

A study on the rate of rental housing built in the GTA found that Ford abolishing rent control for residential units created after November 2018 did not meaningfully contribute to new rental units in the long term. As the report notes, while Ford’s PR success resulted in more investments in 2018, “Progress on purpose-built rental supply is stalling.”

Even if more units were created, Ford’s removal of rent control is a direct factor in skyrocketing rents. If less units are built, and in those built after 2018, landlords have all the power to set prices, is it any wonder that rents have spiked, and homelessness is increasingly becoming a problem?

But social murder permeates nearly all of the Ford government’s failures. When the government consulted experts in early 2023 during the formulations of a plan to expand access to alcohol across the province, they were told that moving too quickly would bring health risks for the public. The province ignored them, and supercharged plans to bring alcohol to corner stores. As Global News reported, multiple experts and advocacy organizations told Ford’s team that expanded access would ease use for those vulnerable to alcohol’s health effects. Indeed, a study published in JAMA that studied more than 135,000 subjects found that any level of alcohol consumption could be bad for the drinker’s health. Yet Ford rushed through his government’s expansion regardless of the public health consequences.

Healthcare is the most clear example of this. Ford shut down Ontario’s COVID-19 wastewater surveillance program at the end of July. The move was justified by pointing to a program by the Public Health Agency of Canada, but as Nicole Ireland reported for The Canadian Press, they only test four sites in Toronto. There are plans for four other cities in Ontario, but now the public is even less equipped to understand COVID risk, all as the debilitating effects of long COVID continue to affect millions of Canadians.

Even though Ford has been in charge of the province since 2018, wait times are continuing to deteriorate and ERs periodically close across the province. The Ontario Health Coalition found that there were 1199 closures of “vital health care services” in 2023. There are 2.5 million Ontarians without a family doctor. 

Immediate effects from these policies are bad for health, but what about those who are deterred from even attempting to access services that may need preventative care? How many lives could be saved if a disease is caught early? Where are Ontarians even supposed to go if they’re struck with a health emergency? 

According to a hilarious joke from Ford, the vet. 

Even the shuttering of supervised consumption sites ran counter to expert advice explicitly sought by the Ontario government. After Karolina Huebner-Makurat was tragically killed by a stray bullet in a shooting outside a Leslieville site, reviews were commissioned to learn about the operation of the centre and how to improve things. They didn’t recommend closing the centre, and one report even explicitly stated they’re “implemented to save lives,” but Ford decided to do it anyway.

Social murder will never be announced as such, for obvious reasons. So Ford and anyone else like him will use the barest of excuses for the policies. Justifying their closure of safe consumptions by declaring they shouldn’t exist within 200 meters of schools is clearly meant to signal a “think of the children” narrative. How many 7/11s and Beer Stores are close to schools? 

Social murder is a choice, and it’s indefensible. So how do you explain yourself? Deny, deny, deny. In an interview with Jack Hauen from The Trillium, where he asked about the calculations the government has made of the resulting deaths, Health Minister Sylvia Jones said “Jack, people are not going to die.” It doesn’t matter to them that this flies in the face of all evidence. The government has shown it’s perfectly content to facilitate these deaths, so why should that change now?

What’s the motivator for perpetuating this deadly state of affairs? Simply ask: Who benefits? In this case, it’s wealthy people like Ford, who would rather have victims of the toxic drug crisis be removed from their view entirely. If they can’t see it, it’s not a problem.

Deaths that will result from shuttering safe consumption sites are entirely preventable, but so are the vast majority deaths from health problems, homelessness and alcoholism. Those responsible aren’t being held to account. No, far from it, they’re racking up as much as they can. Moreover, they’ve forgone even attempting to cloak their disdain in expert opinion. 

The only solution they’re interested in? Invest in body bags.