Edit: This article will be updated soon with information on HART Hub.
Recently, I learned about an organization called Eva’s in Toronto, which operates youth shelters including Eva’s Place, Eva’s Satellite, and Phoenix. I was deeply impressed by their approach. While they meet youth where they are, they don’t stop there. Residents get access to nutritious meals, job training, mental health supports, and life skills that give them a genuine path forward.
It made me reflect on what we are doing here in Durham Region and what we could be doing better.
Imagine creating a dedicated recovery campus in Durham, built outside dense downtown blocks. Not a place of punishment or isolation, but a peaceful sanctuary designed for healing. A venue where people struggling with severe addiction and public substance use can be directed, treated with dignity, and given a structured pathway back into society. Inside this single supportive environment, medical care, addiction treatment, transitional housing, counseling, and employment training would all work together to help people rebuild their lives.
This is where we need to draw a clear line: Open drug use in public spaces cannot simply be accepted as the new normal.
Permitting severe public distress to continue uninterrupted isn’t progressive; it is abandoning vulnerable people to their circumstances. Today’s dominant approach too often mistakes passive non-intervention for compassion. But letting someone languish in severe addiction and psychosis without meaningful intervention is not kindness. We need clear boundaries and boundaries do not have to mean jail.
Canada is already beginning to recognize this shift. Alberta recently broke new ground with its Compassionate Intervention Act, creating a legal and health framework to divert individuals in crisis out of dangerous environments and into structured stabilization and treatment. It proves that governments can and must take an active role when addiction severely impairs someone’s ability to keep themselves or others safe.
Here in Ontario, we can build on this momentum while ensuring individual Charter rights are fully respected. We do not need to choose between public safety and civil liberties.
Instead of cycling individuals through the criminal justice system or leaving them on the streets, we can establish explicit Health Diversion Pathways. When someone is engaged in open public drug use or severe disruption, police and crisis response teams should offer a structured choice: face standard legal consequences, OR enter a health-focused recovery pathway at a dedicated campus. Because individuals retain procedural due process, access to legal counsel, and voluntary choice through diversion, their constitutional rights remain completely intact. For acute life-threatening crises, these pathways can seamlessly connect with existing medical assessment standards under the Mental Health Act.
I understand the argument that firm intervention limits individual choice. But when addiction reaches the point where someone is repeatedly harming themselves, disrupting public spaces, and declining support, society has a collective responsibility to act.Think about parenting. Good parents don’t let their children engage in self-destructive behavior simply because it is “their choice.” They set firm boundaries because they care deeply about their child’s future. Severe addiction requires a similar mindset. We must approach every person with empathy, respect, and unconditional care-paired with firm, unyielding expectations that help must be accepted.
Building a recovery community like this does not require waiting entirely on government funding. It can be forged through dynamic partnerships between regional government, healthcare networks, non-profits, philanthropic foundations, and the local business community.
Of course, finding the exact balance between individual liberty and public responsibility will spark debate and that is a conversation worth having. But the status quo is clearly failing both those living in addiction and the communities around them.
Compassion and accountability are not opposites. In fact, the most compassionate thing we can do as a society is to refuse to give up on people-even when that means actively stepping in to guide them toward the help they desperately need.
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