Volunteers with Ryan’s Hope “died” today for what they believe in, with the hope that the province’s supervised consumption sites (SCSs) can be saved from closure.
The Barrie-based non-profit organization that assists the homeless descended on Memorial Square in downtown Barrie on Monday during the lunch hour to speak out against the Ontario government’s plan to close the SCS sites.
On Aug. 20, Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced the province would close 10 consumption and treatment services (CTS) sites within 200 metres of schools or child-care centres and ban future ones.
The event took place on the day the Ontario Legislative Assembly resumed.
Die-ins were scheduled to take place simultaneously across the province.
“I’m here because this is an attack on people who use drugs by the provincial government,” Mac Chown, a doctor who is now starting his own primary care practice for unhoused people in Barrie, said.
Chown recently stopped working in the emergency department of Orillia Soldiers' Memorial Hospital to focus on his new practice.
He thinks the government’s decision to close the SCS sites “flies in the face of scientific evidence,” and is going to “kill people”.
“It’s playing political games to try to win votes, and direct anger against the most vulnerable people in our society because that’s a useful political tactic for them,” Chown said.
He believes the government’s strategy has nothing to do with science, and “It has nothing to do with what’s best for people. It has nothing to do with helping people, so it’s just cynical politics, and it’s disgusting.”
The event heard from a few speakers, followed by eight minutes of silence, “which is one minute for each life lost per day in Ontario to the toxic drug crisis,” Ryan’s Hope director Christine Nayler said prior to the event’s start.
There were people with chalk who then went around during the die-in to make outlines of the protester’s bodies as they were lying down on the pavement in the square, “as a visual to show that these were people’s lives that were lost, and they mattered.”
