From left to right: Terry Sheehan, Member of Parliament for Sault Ste. Marie, Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Minister of Health, Mayor Christian Provenzano
By Sootoday James Hopkin
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Federal health minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor heard that Sault Ste. Marie is heavily under-resourced during a discussion with members of the Sault Ste. Marie and Area Drug Strategy and community stakeholders at city hall Wednesday.
“We just wanted to give the minister a really good idea of what’s happening locally,” said Sault Ste. Marie and Area Drug Strategy Co-Chair Allison McFarlane following the meeting. “Sault Ste. Marie – and as you know, other small communities around Canada – are really heavily impacted by the opioid crisis, so we just wanted to give her a better picture of things that were going on.”
“We need more resources in this community,” said drug strategy chair Charles Shamess. “It’s known that we are an under-resourced community, especially around substance use.”
Shamess told SooToday that the local drug strategy committee, which consists of frontline organizations and workers who deal with substance use issues, told Petitpas Taylor of the need for additional resources and infrastructure.
“The main concern was the need for the Level III Withdrawal Management [facility], and that the Sault is under-resourced,” said Shamess. “It doesn’t have the services that we need.”
“But one of the best things about everybody around the table, all the organizations are members of the drug strategy, and what we all said is that we collaborate together. We’re ready to go, we just do not have the resources – literally – from the provincial government and the federal government.”
The drug strategy says there’s a need for a large scale youth substance use prevention program, in addition to more funding in order to increase harm reduction and outreach services. Shamess also identified the need for funds to better serve Indigenous community members, both on-reserve and off-reserve, in terms of the cultural-appropriate practices that frontline agencies could potentially offer.
“There’s only so much the federal government can do in terms of health care – the provincial government has a large amount of responsibility for that – but she certainly heard us,” Shamess said.
Petitpas Taylor told SooToday that the federal government has made “significant” regulatory changes to make sure that more services to combat the national opioid crisis are readily available, cutting red tape around access to medication replacement therapy and harm reduction supports.
“Our government has made sure that harm reduction has been included as a part of our Canadian drug strategy,” said Petitpas Taylor. “We want to be able to ensure that we can meet clients where they are at, and not where we think they should be, because when it comes to substance use issues, it’s not about what we think is right – we need to make sure that we meet clients on the ground and provide them with the help and support that they need.”
When asked about the need expressed by the local drug strategy committee for a withdrawal management locally, the federal health minister says the Liberal government is in the process of getting up to speed on supportive housing projects.
“Previous governments have really ignored supportive housing, and have ignored the investments that were needed in that area – so right now, the government is playing catch up in making sure that significant investments are made,” she said.
The federal government, so far, has doled out $51 million to Ontario to combat opioid issues as part of its national strategy, which included an additional $150 million in emergency funding.
“We certainly hope that Sault Ste. Marie will benefit from those investments…and I’m sure with the strong that you have in Ottawa with Terry here [Sheehan], that he’ll be advocating to make sure that the Sault gets its fair share of the funding from the national housing strategy,” Petitpas Taylor said.
“What we heard here was a bunch of really good ideas about how we can address the issue, and I think now what we need to do is amp up the message to the provinces,” said Sault Ste. Marie MP Terry Sheehan. “There are a number of local solutions here that can help not only Sault Ste. Marie, but probably could be exported as an example to other areas of Ontario and communities that are similar to Sault Ste. Marie because of that collaborative effort that we have had, and show the way forward to other people.”
“But the key now is to unlock the money that the federal government has already signed with the province to get out to communities like Sault Ste. Marie to combat this issue.”
