Baranyai: Unintended consequences could be avoided

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Ontario Premier Doug Ford is playing Russian roulette with the law of unintended consequences.

You’ve seen this law at work. It watched as Ford capped post-secondary tuition – surely a popular move – then struck when cash-panicked colleges admitted international students in greater and greater numbers. Nobody seemed to plan for the added strain on affordable housing.

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Many policies with unintended consequences seem like common sense. For example: Build more highways to ease traffic congestion. It sounds perfectly sensible, except history shows the opposite is true. Induced demand makes traffic even worse: If you build it, they will come. Los Angeles has paved itself into an endless snarl of gridlock. In Houston, a 26-lane freeway expansion actually made afternoon commutes 55 percent longer. Nevertheless, Ford is determined Highway 413 will be a magical corridor to prosperity.

An unintended outcome is not the same as unforeseen.

Take the arrival of beer, wine and pre-mixed drinks in corner stores. The last major expansion into grocery stores (by the Liberals, in 2015) resulted in a steep 17.8 per cent increase in alcohol-related visits to emergency departments. Easier access to alcohol comes with a hefty price tag of unintended consequences. The Ontario Public Health Association has warned the new rollout – nearly quadrupling sales outlets – will increase domestic violence, street violence, road crashes and thefts, not to mention chronic disease.

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Here’s another unintended certainty: More underage customers will be served.

The province has pledged $10 million during five years to support public health efforts and social responsibility. So far, it also has ignored the recommendations of every health organization and it’s own chief medical officer of health.

Next, the Ford government plans to prevent supervised consumption sites from operating within 200 metres of a school or daycare facility. On the surface, the policy sounds sensible. Why would anyone want those two clienteles in close proximity?

Of course, they already coexist. That’s why supervised consumption sites opened in these neighbourhoods. The most effective place for them is where drug use is prevalent. That’s why they save lives. Consumption sites can’t be shuffled off to out-of-the-way locales any more than a pond can be relocated to the side of a hill.

Even if they could, it’s not clear the social ills in some of these neighbourhoods – including property damage and violence – would leave with them. Some problems, such as discarded syringes, would almost certainly get worse.

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Ford’s new legislation, if passed, will force at least 10 out of 17 provincially regulated supervised consumption sites to close by March 31, 2025. Five of them are in Toronto, where deaths from opioid toxicity have increased 74 per cent since 2019.

Thunder Bay, which suffered the highest opioid-related mortality rates across Ontario in 2022, will lose its only supervised consumption site. Other facilities in Sudbury and Timmins already have closed for lack of funding. It’s looking bleak for Northern Ontario.

Health Minister Sylvia Jones says the province will invest $378 million in 19 new homelessness and addiction recovery treatment (HART) hubs, with 375 supportive housing units and treatment beds. The added detox services are badly needed, no question. However, they’re needed in addition to – not in lieu of – overdose prevention. The new hubs won’t even provide needle exchange services.

The consequences of losing safe consumption sites are that more people will die from overdoses and a toxic drug supply. Fewer people will access vital health and harm reduction services, suffering worse health outcomes, such as infection from syringes.

This government should spare a thought for the unintended, but foreseeable, consequences of these policies. Unintended is not the same as unavoidable.

write.robin@baranyai.ca

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