Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, and Timmins now top the list of cities in Ontario with the highest rates of opioid deaths. Greater Sudbury ranks seventh. The numbers are grim: Thunder Bay lost 80 people in 2024—69.14 deaths per 100,000 residents. Sault Ste. Marie recorded 38 deaths, a rate of 48.36. Timmins followed with 18 deaths and a rate of 40.74. Sudbury saw 59 lives lost, at a rate of 32.81.
The picture darkens further.
In Sudbury and Manitoulin 42 people died from suspected drug poisonings between January and April 2025 alone. That’s a death rate of 55 per 100,000—more than triple the provincial average. Over the past three years, this region has averaged 138 drug-related deaths per year. These are not just numbers. These are stories cut short, families cracked open, communities grieving.
And still, the province is closing the doors.
In March 2025, nine supervised consumption sites were shuttered across Ontario—despite a court injunction, despite the data, despite the lives at stake. The province’s argument? These sites were too close to schools and daycares, and their existence, according to one criminologist cited by the government, invited “crime and disorder.”
In Thunder Bay, clients will now need to travel nearly eight hours to access similar care in Manitoba. Path 525, the city’s only sanctioned site, is set to close. Timmins’ only site shut its doors last summer. Sudbury’s Spot closed the year before.
The province has replaced them with so-called HART hubs—Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment centres. They come with four times the funding but none of the overdose prevention services. No place to use safely. No trained staff with naloxone ready. Just a name change and a waiting list.
Sudbury’s HART hub, promised for Lorraine Street, missed its April 1 launch. It remains unopened.
Meanwhile, the coroner’s reports keep piling up. Between 2016 and 2023, opioids and stimulants claimed the lives of 26,673 Ontarians. COVID, by comparison, took 18,873.
The pandemic didn’t just accelerate the crisis. It blew it wide open. A study published in 2024 showed opioid deaths in Ontario surged by 60% in the first year of COVID-19 restrictions. In Northern Ontario, deaths doubled. More women died. More workers from resource sectors died. More people died alone, in their homes, far from help. Fentanyl was involved more often.
Inhalation—less stigmatized than injection—was the most common route.
These aren’t “addicts.” They’re miners, mothers, teenagers trying something for the first time. People using casually, occasionally, tragically. The toxic drug supply doesn’t discriminate.
And yet, the provincial response has pivoted toward abstinence-only models. Harm reduction—backed by science, endorsed by physicians, and proven to save lives—is being quietly dismantled.
Dr. Ahmed Bayoumi, a Toronto-based epidemiologist, has tracked thousands of overdoses averted at Ontario’s supervised consumption sites—21,979 between 2020 and 2024. More than a third of those interventions happened at the very sites now shuttered. “It’s not a theory,” said lawyer Carlo Di Carlo, who fought the closures in court. “People would have died.”
Still, the Ford government pressed ahead. On December 3, 2025, Ontario’s Auditor General Shelley Spence confirmed what many already knew: the province’s opioid strategy is “outdated,” having gone untouched since 2016. Her office found serious failures in coordination, oversight, and responsiveness. Even the new HART hub model lacked a proper business case.
The Association of Municipalities of Ontario, in a July 2024 report, called the opioid crisis a systemic failure—rooted in years of underinvestment in housing, income supports, and mental health care. It warned that piecemeal, reactive measures will not save lives.
The North knows this already. We live it.
The overdose crisis here is not a ripple—it is a flood. It cannot be solved with shuttered doors and slogans.
Evidence based care is being called for because people are dying. And the silence from Queen’s Park is deafening.
