It closed that fall.<\/p>\n
That left just the Sandy Hill site and another one at Shepherds of Good Hope, known as the Trailer and operated by Ottawa Inner City Health.<\/p>\n
Both were forced to close on June 13 after the province cut off funding.<\/p>\n
Since then, there’s been three full weeks of data on suspected overdose deaths in Ottawa.<\/p>\n
The nine deaths recorded between June 15 and July 5 aren’t out of the ordinary for this time of the year. Neither are the 289 emergency room visits for suspected overdoses in the four weeks from June 15 to July 12.<\/p>\n
![\"Rob](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/https:\/\/media.zenfs.com\/en\/cbc.ca\/67b294bb62c2ee3e8dffa4ce6e6298a5.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
(Mathieu Deroy\/CBC)<\/p>\n
There were worries that the closures would put pressure on emergency services. But Nicholas Guertin, acting public information officer for the Ottawa Paramedic Service, said that so far they haven’t noted anything out of the ordinary.<\/p>\n
OPH told CBC in a statement, however, that the data should be interpreted with caution.<\/p>\n
They record suspected overdoses \u2014 confirmed data will take months to roll in \u2014 and OPH said it’s simply too early to identify any trends linked to the closures.<\/p>\n
Overdoses can go underreported, OPH said, because people may not go to hospital or call emergency services. The stats can vary from week to week due to seasonal changes and shifts in the toxic drug supply, they added.<\/p>\n
Boyd said that supply could shift again at any time.<\/p>\n
“We are really concerned that there could be a spike in toxicity and that we will see an increase in deaths as a consequence of that,” he said.<\/p>\n
“We are definitely not in a position to judge. We need a lot more time and a lot more data.”<\/p>\n
‘Where can people go?’<\/p>\n
Dean Dewar, who previously ran the Sandy Hill supervised consumption site, said he’s seen much the same thing.<\/p>\n
Overdoses are slightly up around the centre, he said, but “pretty similar to last year at this time.”<\/p>\n
When CBC visited Sandy Hill and met Watt and Tscherkassow, there were about two dozen people gathered in two groups outside. Many were using drugs openly. One woman was passed out in a camping chair. Needles were discarded on the ground.<\/p>\n
Such scenes are nothing new, though Dewar said the issue \u2014 which he calls “congregation” \u2014 does seem to have gotten worse since the closure. With people unable to use drugs inside the building, Dewar said it’s a tough problem to solve.<\/p>\n
“I think the question that we have yet to answer is, ‘Where can people go that’s outside?'” he said. “We’ve talked to the city, the police, and no one has a great answer.”<\/p>\n
It’s tough telling someone to stop using near Sandy Hill when they’re in tears and vowing they can’t stop, Dewar said, especially since they might be at greater risk if they’re pushed into the shadows.<\/p>\n
“I think our biggest concern is someone trying to not be in public view while using and going in an alleyway and using by themselves,” Dewar said. “And that is the greatest risk of death there.”<\/p>\n
Police have been watching for issues since the site closures, said Ottawa Police Service Insp. Cory Robertson.<\/p>\n
He said there was little noticeable change in the first week, though more recently there has been some signs of worsening social disorder and public drug use.<\/p>\n
“We’re noticing some increase,” he said. “We don’t necessarily attribute it to the closure of the sites. We think it’s also the season. It’s July, there’s traditionally more [people] out and about.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Drug activity around Sandy Hill Community Health Centre has at times shifted west into the community, Robertson said.<\/p>\n
![\"Inspector](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/https:\/\/media.zenfs.com\/en\/cbc.ca\/298b34978fe8bcc7469cf96ead091eea.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Insp. Cory Robertson of the Ottawa Police Service says officers are stepping up patrols and trying to discourage open-air drug use. (Arthur White-Crummey\/CBC)<\/p>\n
‘You see it almost every day’<\/p>\n
Michael Roe lives right next door to the community health centre, and he’s certainly seen a shift. With no option to use inside, the walkway along the side of his building, he said, has become an unofficial consumption site.<\/p>\n
“Before you wouldn’t see anyone,” he said. “Now you see it almost every day \u2026 I can’t have my own daughter over here to visit me because I feel it’s not actually safe for her to be here.”<\/p>\n
That’s not the only thing he’s worried about. He’s also noticed a lot more discarded needles.<\/p>\n
“It’s out in the open a lot more [over] the past three weeks. I’ve been seeing it in parks,” he said. “I have a grandson who’s 19 months, and he can’t go to the park because it’s in the sands.”<\/p>\n
Roe said the supervised consumption site should come back.<\/p>\n
“It’s really disgusting to see how much impact it’s having,” he said of the closure. “It hasn’t made people safer. It’s had the opposite effect.”<\/p>\n
But his neighbour Dennis Roberts has had a very different experience.<\/p>\n
Roberts said the drug-related “chaos” along Besserer Street has relented, adding that he feels safer with the supervised consumption site closed.<\/p>\n
“It’s getting a lot quieter,” he said. “There’s less people coming here. Before there was a lot of chaos, a lot of issues with people injecting \u2026 I’ve seen way less drug use out on the streets.”<\/p>\n
‘A sense of betrayal’<\/p>\n
Robertson said police have been stepping up patrols in the area. He said they’re targeting “predators” coming into the community to deal drugs to vulnerable people, but they aren’t looking to criminalize users.<\/p>\n
“We’re out engaging people that are using illegal substances and encouraging them to not do it in public, which is kind of the goal,” he said. “We realize you have a problem, you may be an addict \u2014 but this isn’t the place.”<\/p>\n
Boyd said while the area around the former Trailer site has actually become a bit quieter, it’s not a a fix. People have simply dispersed, he said, pushing drug use into more places than it was in the past.<\/p>\n
“All that we’re doing is moving people around the community without any solution to it,” he said.<\/p>\n
Even if overdoses haven’t shot up, Boyd said losing access to the supervised sites has harmed drug users who relied on them.<\/p>\n
He’s heard reports that some are sharing needles, raising worries about a looming uptick in infectious disease that won’t show up right away. He’s also afraid that many drug users are losing connections to needed support.<\/p>\n
“There was a really immediate impact on them, in terms of a sense of betrayal, a sense of not being accepted in society and a fragmentation of the community,” Boyd said.<\/p>\n
“It was a place where people could go where they knew they weren’t going to be judged.”<\/p>\n
Together, Sandy Hill and Ottawa Inner City Health lost about $4.5 million when the province cut off funding for the sites \u2014 and Dewar and Boyd say it should reinvest that money in supporting the community.<\/p>\n
Boyd said Ottawa Inner City Health wants to keep doing mobile outreach to help people they’ve lost touch with since the closures, but there’s simply no ongoing money to fund it.<\/p>\n
“Our main goal is to be there wherever the clients go … just to keep them connected,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Outside the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, Courtney Watt is keeping a close eye on a man lying…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136281,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[36609,35620,34184,61,25372,45380,35618,45381,11310,11314],"class_list":["post-136280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ottawa","tag-community-health-centre","tag-dean-dewar","tag-oph","tag-ottawa","tag-ottawa-paramedic-service","tag-rob-boyd","tag-sandy-hill","tag-sandy-hill-community-health-centre","tag-somerset-west-community-health-centre","tag-supervised-consumption-site"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}