The Battle for Leslieville

When Andrea Nickel and her husband moved to Leslieville in 2008, the neighbourhood was gritty but quickly gentrifying. The indie coffee shop Mercury Espresso Bar had opened a couple of years earlier and was soon joined by a Starbucks. Along the main strip on Queen East—roughly bookended by Carlaw and Greenwood—cafés and bistros were interspersed with laundromats, convenience stores and a dive bar called Tasty Chicken House that, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, didn’t sell chicken. Nickel liked that the area was diverse and much quieter than the west end. Affordability added to the appeal. The couple bought their place for $570,000, expecting it to be their starter home, but they loved everything about living there—the people, the feeling of community—and they stayed put.

Over the next decade, the area transformed into a sort of east-end Roncesvalles as other progressive-minded young professionals moved there looking for space to raise their families. New daycares clustered around the neighbourhood’s busiest intersections. The average price of a detached home rose from around $400,000 in the early 2000s to $1.6 million this year. Tasty Chicken went out of business. In the shadow of former factories, Leslieville residents can now sip $19 glasses of chablis, buy pretty macarons or share a $200 48-ounce steak paella.

Throughout all the change, the South Riverdale Community Health Centre remained a pillar. It opened in a former police station on Pape north of Queen in 1976, becoming an integral part of the neighbourhood, then moved to Queen and Carlaw, smack dab in the middle of Leslieville, in the late 1990s. In addition to routine medical care and a diabetes clinic, the centre offers things like tai chi, mindfulness and cooking programs. It has also provided harm reduction services for drug users, such as handing out clean needles, since the ’90s. In November of 2017, the centre ushered in another change: the opening of a supervised consumption site called KeepSix, a reference to having someone’s back.

Supervised consumption sites don’t supply drugs, but they do provide clean needles, pipes and a safe, hygienic place for people to use drugs, with the aim of preventing overdoses and the spread of disease. As both a consumption and treatment services site, KeepSix can also connect clients with primary care and other health and social services. Harm reduction proponents tend to look at these sites as part of a broader swath of solutions, which may include drug decriminalization, increased funding for mental health and housing, and providing drug users with prescribed medications. Ultimately, though, the thinking behind them is that abstinence-based programs often fail. If people are going to use drugs anyway, why not help lower the risk? The year KeepSix opened, there were more than 1,250 opioid-related overdoses in Ontario, an increase of 45 per cent over 2016. By 2019, things were so dire in Toronto that police had agreed to overlook an unsanctioned supervised consumption site at Moss Park—­anything to help stop the fatalities. But the situation was about to get even worse: the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which had been infiltrating the supply for years, was suddenly everywhere.

On paper, Leslieville seemed like the perfect spot for the east end’s supervised consumption site. Locations are chosen based on a number of factors—overdose mortality being a key one—but it helped that the area was already home to several at-risk populations, including seniors who lived in nearby subsidized buildings and people who frequented the area’s shelters. Residents were largely left-leaning and generally supportive, the type to hang a sign in their front window or lawn stating “Everyone is welcome”—and, crucially, to support something like KeepSix.

Related: The untold story of the doctor who fuelled a drug crisis

Though funding came from the province, the city had certain oversight duties, like ensuring that the staff at KeepSix cleaned up discarded needles around the building. The site itself was responsible for security and community engagement. It had to follow municipal, provincial and federal guidelines—namely through community consultations—for ensuring harmony with Morse Street Public School, the Montessori school and the seven daycares within 200 metres. And it had also agreed to a zero-tolerance policy for drug dealing on or around the premises.

Despite these measures, it took only a few years for trouble to start. According to Nickel, she and her neighbours started to find used needles and drugs left behind in the laneways near the centre. She saw crowds of people hanging around the site, sometimes openly using or selling drugs. By 2021, she and her neighbours were regularly swapping disturbing anecdotes. One day after school, her young son arrived home in tears. Two men outside the centre had been berating a woman, he told his mom, so he’d stopped, causing the men to turn their rage on him, yelling incoherently. Another time, Nickel says, a man threw needles at her car while she was driving through a laneway near her home. Nickel supported the centre and was ideologically aligned with its mission, but she felt unsafe. Didn’t the centre bear some responsibility for what its clients were doing just outside its doors? Didn’t the city? Nickel had been in touch with the centre and her city councillor since 2019, but it wasn’t until 2021 that she had a formal meeting, over Zoom, with the centre’s CEO, Jason Altenberg, and three of his colleagues. They listened, she told me, but nothing changed. Perhaps her complaints were too anecdotal to address. Frustrated, she decided to formalize the neighbourhood’s concerns, thinking they could be used as leverage by both the community and the centre to lobby the province for more support.

In mid-2023, Nickel set up a shared Google Form to collect reports of dangerous or disturbing activity in the vicinity of the centre. Between late May and late June, 90 residents logged 146 complaints. Almost half of them were about open drug use, but there were also concerns around discarded drug paraphernalia, drug dealing and aggressive behaviour. Grievances included someone throwing a can of beer at a kid’s head as he walked near the centre and the area around the building being used as an “open-air drug market.” Armed with this data, Nickel and several community members brought their concerns to the centre once more, in late June of 2023. Nickel says that during their meeting with Altenberg and members of his team, they begged the centre to hire security. An around-the-clock presence, they argued, would curb the drug use and the drug dealing without affecting the centre’s work, which they all agreed should continue. If private security wasn’t a viable option, they suggested moving KeepSix away from Queen and Carlaw—more than 200 metres from the area’s schools and daycares, that is. The presentation included a map showing a possible relocation for the site: a commercial area south of Lake Shore Boulevard, removed from children and foot traffic.

The staff listened but, much like two years earlier, said little. A week later, Nickel received an email from the centre explaining that they’d reached out to a security company but hadn’t heard back and apologizing that they didn’t have any additional updates to share. Reading it, Nickel wondered if something horrible had to happen before anything would change.

On Friday, July 7, 2023, around 12:30 p.m., Karolina Huebner-Makurat was out for a walk on her way to pick up lunch. The 44-year-old, whom almost everyone called Caroline, was born in Poland and had lived in the neighbourhood for nearly a decade. An only child, she immigrated to Canada with her parents one month before her ninth birthday. She grew up in Scarborough and then studied at Trent, Queen’s and Concordia, where she earned a master’s in education technology. She returned to Toronto to teach high school computer classes for a few years, then spent another few years teaching in Turkey and Egypt, travelling throughout the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

In 2014, she married Adrian Makurat, an executive in market research for the billboard industry, and they settled in Leslieville. By the summer of 2023, they had two daughters, ages seven and four, with wide, toothy smiles, blonde hair, and denim-blue eyes, like their mother. The family was outdoorsy, skiing together or simply visiting the nearby Tiverton Avenue parkette, where the girls played and Huebner-Makurat chatted with her neighbours. She was the type of person to ask someone how their day was going and seem genuinely interested in the answer. And like plenty of others in her neighbourhood, Huebner-Makurat was politically progressive, posting to social media about the importance of reproductive rights or against the war in Ukraine.

On that day in July, she was near the corner of Queen and Carlaw, in front of the clothing store Kotn, when three men across the street erupted into a loud argument in front of the church just next to the centre. Police allege that two of them, a 19-year-old named Ahmed Ali and a 20-year-old named Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim, tried to rob the third, 32-year-old Damian Hudson, of drugs, money or both. Ali and Hudson drew handguns and began firing. One of the bullets careened north across Queen, where it struck Huebner-­Makurat. She crumpled to the ground as the men fled east. Staff from the centre and passersby ran to help her and tried desperately to save her life. An ­ambulance rushed her to the hospital, where she was later pronounced dead.

As the shots rang out, people took to social media to warn one another of the situation. Businesses along Queen East locked their doors, police cordoned off the intersection and news teams arrived to broadcast live from the site. The police tweeted updates and held a press conference that afternoon. On Sunday, they released surveillance images of the three suspects and asked for the public’s help in identifying them.

Huebner-Makurat’s death sent shockwaves of grief and fury throughout the neighbourhood. Flowers quickly amassed at the spot where she was killed, creating a hill of starkly cheery sunflowers, roses and gerberas. Within a week, police made their first arrest: Hudson had an extensive, violent rap sheet and was out on bail for two counts of assault and for failing to comply with a probation order. He had struggled with crack cocaine use and had been found guilty in 2019 of aggravated assault after he stabbed a man in the heart, leaving him in a coma for weeks. Police charged him with the second-­degree murder of Huebner-Makurat.

More than 300 people gathered at Huebner-Makurat’s public memorial, held in Jimmie Simpson Park 10 days after her killing. Many of them wore bursts of ­yellow—her favourite colour and an emblem of her gregarious personality. Attendees wove their sunflowers and yellow ribbons through the park’s fence. They sobbed. They held hands with the strangers next to them. And they listened as her husband, Adrian, took to the stage to make an impromptu speech. He thanked the neighbourhood for its support and talked about how kind and wonderful his wife was. If Makurat believed the centre was in any way culpable for his wife’s death, he didn’t say so.

Nickel and her cohort saw it differently: Huebner-Makurat’s death was preventable. To them, the shooting was a direct result of the centre’s poor management. They criticized its lack of security and what they saw as its astounding failure to properly plan for the site’s negative effects. They argued that the centre, the city and the province should have better prepared for—and mitigated against—what they saw as a correlating rise in lawlessness, open drug use and loitering in the area. To them, someone being seriously injured near KeepSix was a question of when, not if. Now that the worst had happened, it seemed clear that, finally, something had to change. Nickel and her neighbours would make sure of it.

In 2003, the City of Vancouver opened the first legal supervised consumption site in Canada. Its central philosophy—that substance use is a health issue, not a criminal one—would go on to influence similar sites across North America, including those in Toronto. To proponents of the harm reduction model, shame, stigma and judgment block any path to safer use and recovery. So, too, does the threat of criminal prosecution. The harm reduction experts I spoke to all had a similar message: we are in a crisis, and the goal must be to keep people alive. The stakes for getting it wrong are high: between 2020 and 2022, 1,647 people in Toronto died from overdoses. In 2022, two-thirds of those deaths happened in private residences, which is why supervised consumption is so important: if something goes wrong, there’s someone there to try to revive you. Last year at KeepSix, staff reversed 74 overdoses. In 2022, they reversed 124.

I spoke with one woman, Vanessa Valcour, whose daughter Cassie lived in Leslieville. Cassie was a 23-year-old social worker who understood the dangers of addiction, but she still used drugs, often at KeepSix. Sometimes Valcour went with her for support, and she appreciated the care that staff at the centre showed her daughter. One day in August of 2022, Cassie decided to get high at home. She overdosed and died in her sleep. Valcour takes issue with the backlash against drug users since the events of last summer. “People who use the centre’s services have just as much right as everybody else to be in the neighbourhood,” she told me, “and to be treated fairly and with dignity.”

Harm reduction researchers and their allies point to another big aim of supervised consumption sites: to provide pathways to other forms of help, including mental health services, medical treatment and assistance in getting clean. Today, there are six supervised consumption sites in the city located in health centres. The hope is that, if clients decide to stop using, they’ll know the supports they need are in the building.

However, in Leslieville—as in many other communities with supervised consumption sites—people are asking whether the benefits to clients are outweighed by the harm caused to other residents. After Huebner-Makurat’s death, people needed a place to vent, commiserate and foster action. They found it on WhatsApp, in a thread started by Ashley Kea, who moved to her current home in 2017 with her partner. Kea wanted answers from the centre, from politicians and from police: Why weren’t the safety recommendations she and her neighbours had asked for being implemented? And why didn’t it seem like anyone at the centre was listening? Within a few days of Huebner-Makurat’s death, Kea’s WhatsApp group had grown to 400 members.

An early joiner was freelance journalist Derek Finkle, who has written for Toronto Life in the past. Finkle lives next to the centre and would become its loudest critic, writing diatribes against the centre’s management team in the National Post. Another was Nickel. She and Kea had connected during Nickel’s presentation and clicked immediately. Today, they see themselves as a balanced duo: Kea is the heart and passion, they tell me, while Nickel is about facts and details. Together with another neighbour named Jeri Brown, who works in PR, the women planned for a town hall. It would be their chance to finally have their say in front of the people who had the power to make change. They got to work enumerating their key concerns, including the site’s proximity to schools, increased drug activity nearby and a lack of security. They made sure to note reports about people using drugs on the grounds of Morse Street Public School. At this point, the group had no faith in the centre’s ability to prevent another tragedy.

On the evening of July 26, hundreds of Leslieville residents headed over to the Jimmie Simpson Recreation Centre, where Nickel was set to moderate a who’s-who panel of decision makers: Catherine Zahn, then Ontario’s deputy minister of health; Julie Dabrusin, the Liberal MP for Toronto-­Danforth; city councillor Paula Fletcher; Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s chief medical officer; Kim O’Toole, the police superintendent for Division 55; and Jason Altenberg, the centre’s CEO. Media milled around the crowd outside, asking for comments. Finkle, speaking into reporters’ microphones, accused the centre of being improperly managed and complained that it hadn’t listened to residents’ concerns. Desmond Cole is an author and activist who lives immediately next to the centre, close enough for his partner to have heard the fatal gunshot. While Finkle spoke, Cole stood behind him, holding a placard that read “Whose lives do we value?” He loudly and repeatedly interjected, saying that the people who used the centre needed more resources. Finkle tried his best to ignore him and continue on with his message.

Prior to the town hall, the organizers had solicited questions from concerned residents and selected which ones would be put to the officials. The result was a heavy emphasis on accountability and a general sentiment that the consumption site was damaging to Leslieville. Not everyone in attendance blamed the centre for the shooting, nor did everyone want to see KeepSix relocated, but a lot of people did.

In the weeks after the shooting, two factions had emerged and become entrenched: one side believed that the centre had proven it couldn’t handle the assignment and that this failure had dire consequences. How many deaths would be enough? They didn’t want to find out. The other side believed that the site’s clients had just as much right to the neighbourhood as anyone—that, in fact, they’d been there long before the new wave of residents—and wanted KeepSix to stay put. Moving the consumption site away from the health centre would cut its clients off from other forms of treatment.

The latter group included the centre’s staff and the Leslieville Harm Reduction Coalition, of which Cole is a member. A local activist and harm reduction worker named Ola Skudlarska co-founded the coalition after the shooting, believing KeepSix was being unfairly demonized and wanting to defend it and promote the overall mission of harm reduction. Skudlarska believes the discourse around both the centre and harm reduction is itself harmful. Members of the coalition say Leslieville’s challenges are rooted in the convergence of the opioid and housing crises, not in a mismanaged health centre or a poorly located supervised consumption site. As gentrification spreads, Skudlarska sees an alarming trend of drug users and precariously housed people getting pushed to the margins—out of sight, out of mind.

At around 8 p.m., as the town hall came to an end and the crowd dispersed, the only thing that seemed clear was that it had satisfied no one. Discussions in Kea’s WhatsApp group focused on the concerning behaviour they kept witnessing—which showed no signs of abating—and doubled down on the goal of holding the centre, Toronto Public Health and the province to account. Key figures around the issue—staff at the centre, like Altenberg; local politicians, such as Paula Fletcher; police officers—were referred to so often that members eventually began using their first names. The tone was frequently angry, frustrated and cynical. If members of the group had ever trusted the centre or their local politicians, that faith had quickly evaporated.

Related: I was a doctor with a perfect life, until I got hooked on fentanyl

The group chat included a lot of debate around harm reduction principles, regular neighbourhood watch–like warnings and a good amount of venting. “I am just so sick of seeing needles littering the streets, parks and alleys around here,” reads one message from last September. In response to suggestions from Toronto police that Morse Street Public School put up a fence, another said, “We’re going to wind up looking like a war zone.” Jacqueline Court, another resident and occasional poster on the WhatsApp group, shared that her family had been assaulted and that on Heward Avenue someone had threatened to burn down their house with them inside. Near the end of September, one woman posted a picture of a man in a laneway, holding tinfoil that presumably contained drugs. She claimed that, when she and her kids glanced in his direction, he said, “What? It’s better than me raping your children.”

In the months I spent talking with the centre’s staff, clients and supporters, it became clear that they all shared a wariness of the WhatsApp group. Staff pointed out to me that, within two weeks of the shooting, the centre had hired One Community Solutions, a specialized security company. Its staff, trained to support unhoused populations and people with addictions or other mental illnesses, worked around the perimeter of the building from 6 a.m. to midnight. But it did little to quell the hostility toward the centre.

Cole believes some of the safety concerns of the surrounding residents are disingenuous. He doesn’t deny living next to the centre can be challenging, but he’s convinced that the pushback is about property values and a desire to rid the neighbourhood of what certain residents view as its less desirable elements. To him, Skudlarska and other harm reduction activists, the battle is one of class, privilege and money—and that aspect is missing from how the fight has been cast in the public eye. In short, they think their opponents are bigoted NIMBYs. On their end, Finkle, Kea, Nickel and their neighbours believe those who support the centre without question are ideologues pushing a harm reduction agenda that prioritizes the clients of KeepSix over the residents who live next to it. Each side is prone to lazy but effective caricatures of the other. Neither assessment is entirely fair, but in each there is an element of truth.

As Finkle put it to me over coffee last December, he doesn’t oppose the idea of a supervised consumption site. He lost a close friend to overdose and understands the need for a place where people can use drugs safely. The neighbourhood is liberal-minded, he stressed, and everyone lives there because they love it, warts and all. The problem is that “something has gone wrong.” The messaging around harm reduction, he argued, is “borderline zealotry.” Like those who support the centre, Finkle and his allies often fall into a combative us-versus-them mentality. Because I’d previously written critically about how the growing trend of doorbell cameras in Leslieville was deepening community divisions, Finkle viewed me as firmly in the “them” camp—yet another misguided progressive. He has tried to paint me as such in the WhatsApp group, sharing the article I wrote and telling members he was reluctant to speak with me for this story because I was coming to it with “considerable ideological baggage.”

Five weeks after the shooting, police arrested Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim and charged him with manslaughter, robbery and failing to comply with the terms of his probation. And in a move that shocked both the centre and its antagonists, they also charged a fourth person for being involved in Huebner-Makurat’s murder: 23-year-old Khalila Zara Mohammed, who had been a community health worker at KeepSix at the time of the shooting. Police alleged that Mohammed, who’d worked at the centre since 2021, had helped one of the suspects avoid detection and that she’d lied to investigators. She was charged with being an accessory after the fact and obstructing justice. A week later, she was released on $200,000 bail. The centre put out a statement saying it was “distressed” to learn of her potential involvement and would fully cooperate with police. It was an explosive development. Up to that point, critics had viewed the centre staff as distinct from the drug dealers who preyed upon the site’s clientele. The staff’s sins were at best mismanagement and at worst wilful negligence. They hadn’t killed Huebner-Makurat, but you could argue that they had failed to prevent conditions that had led to her death. Now, here were allegations of a direct connection between staff and drug dealers. Anger boiled over at the centre, and its vague statement only exacerbated the rage in the community.

Meanwhile, the Leslieville Harm Reduction Coalition started regular “sharp sweeps” to collect stray needles in the area. They also drafted a letter of support for the centre, gathering more than 2,000 signatures, nearly 800 of which belonged to residents in the immediate neighbourhood. Patricia Melville, who works at the University Health Network’s Centre for Mental Health, was one of them. Several years ago, interested in learning more about harm reduction, she took a tour of KeepSix. She left thinking the work being done there was “heroic,” and she was determined to support the centre. So Melville joined its Community Liaison Committee, which hears from various stakeholders in the neighbourhood, including community members, businesses, politicians, churches, schools, hospitals and shelters. During that time, she gathered feedback from her neighbours and presented their concerns to the centre. The people who’ve been adversarial toward the centre, she told me, want to give the impression that they represent all of Leslieville—but they don’t.

Over the course of my reporting for this story, I visited the centre several times to meet its staff and its clients and to determine how it had—and had not—responded to its critics. The centre is four storeys stretching over half the block. As of 2023, it had more than 200 staff, including doctors, nurses and social workers, and 14,500 registered clients. Posters adorn its walls. One reads, “Every OD is a policy failure.” A staff break room is decorated with a tree of cut-out paper leaves, each with the name of someone who has died of an overdose. The consumption site is located just to the right of the entrance, behind a locked door.

For all the consternation around it, KeepSix is unremarkable: a medium-size room with linoleum floors, hospital-style furniture and fluorescent lights. There is a front desk, artwork on the wall, and a chalkboard where clients can doodle and write messages (“Don’t give up!”; “Have a great week!”). On one side, there are four desks, each separated by barriers, where people can use drugs and safely dispose of needles. Oxygen tanks sit to the side: though many people are now familiar with naloxone, a medication to reverse opioid overdose, pure oxygen is the most common treatment.

Sarah Greig is the centre’s director of mental health and substance use. She has worked in harm reduction and community health for 20 years, including at Moss Park. She told me that, while certain “louder voices” were dominating the conversation in Leslieville, what many people don’t know about the centre is how many lives it saves every year. Sometimes, a caring gesture can make all the difference. During the time I spent with her, I watched Greig stop to help a man under the influence who was fumbling with a door, then later to gently suggest to the same man, who was doubled over in a chair, that he should sit up.

I also chatted with one of the centre’s clients, who goes by MK. He was slight, with cropped bright-mauve hair and piercing pale-blue eyes. A fentanyl user, he was contemplative about the toll of addiction, which he said he wouldn’t wish on anyone. He talked of how he often feels judged and stigmatized in the neighbourhood and how he can’t count the number of people he’s seen overdose or die in the area. And while he felt awful about the shooting—he told me he tried to buy flowers for the makeshift memorial only to be kicked out of the store—he doesn’t attribute it to those who use the supervised consumption site. Gun violence, he said, is just an unfortunate part of life in a big city. There have been similar deaths in Moss Park, but they didn’t get attention because, as he put it, “it’s a rougher, less ritzy neighbourhood.”

I met with Altenberg—who became CEO in January of 2020, after working at the centre for 15 years—three times. When I asked him about the shooting and the centre’s culpability, he took a minute to collect himself and was on the edge of tears. Eventually, he said that there was no person alive who didn’t wish they could go back in time and do any number of things to prevent terrible outcomes. But he didn’t think it was fair to say that the centre’s staff weren’t listening. The problems associated with the centre, he said, are not localized to the centre itself but are ones we share as a society, such as the displacement of homeless people and the toxic street drug supply.

Despite accusations that he wasn’t attentive to community concerns, he said, he had actually been looking into hiring security when the shooting happened. He added that the centre has made several other operational changes since Huebner-Makurat’s death. KeepSix now opens one hour earlier, at 8 a.m., in order to minimize the overlap between clients and kids on their way to school—a measure that has helped, according to Nickel. It has also removed most of its planters and benches to discourage loitering outside, and it has installed a fence around the open area between it and the church next door, which locals said was frequently used for drug deals and where the shooting occurred.

Still, I got the sense that Altenberg and his staff were scrambling to keep up—doing what they could with limited resources and against forces much bigger than they could control. He acknowledged that some people in the neighbourhood believe that the site simply can’t handle the escalating opioid crisis, and he said he’s “open to that being a possible truth to which we need to respond.” In July, the centre had established a new group, the Safer Community Committee, made up of 10 area residents—­including Finkle, Nickel and Kea—and six representatives from local businesses and service organizations. Its mandate was to identify safety and security problems in the area and generate solutions. However, it was a short-lived, disastrous endeavour: after just five meetings—most of which were characterized by hostility, disagreements and accusations—the group imploded, and more than half of its members resigned.

A year after Huebner-Makurat’s death, there is no resolution in sight. The accused have yet to stand trial, and one of them, alleged gunman Ahmed Ali, is still at large. Police have issued a Canada-wide warrant and believe he fled to Somalia. Following the shooting, Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced what she called a critical incident review of the province’s consumption sites, and in October of 2023, she put a pause on approving new sites while the review was underway. That same month, she appointed a supervisor for the centre. Jill Campbell, a former executive at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, was tasked with completing a review of the site and was granted full decision-making power over any changes that result from the review. Campbell initially agreed to an interview but later declined to speak with me. Altenberg, who had led the centre through its most difficult moments, announced in May that he was resigning and would be leaving his post by the end of this summer.

This February, impatient for change, Jacqueline Court, the resident who reported to the WhatsApp group that somebody had threatened to burn down her house, teamed up with a local seafood restaurant, Eastside Social. Together, they are pursuing a class action against the centre, the city and the province. The lawsuit alleges that the centre contributed to increased crime and a rapid deterioration of the area and did not adhere to the city’s policy of zero tolerance for drug dealing. There is some academic research that contradicts the class action’s assertions. Jamie Livingston, a criminology professor at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, told me that people will sometimes misattribute a rise in crime to the presence of a supervised consumption site. He points to the example of Alberta, where the government whipped up opposition to supervised consumption sites by implying they caused more crime—but crime had gone up for years in areas removed from the sites too.

Meanwhile, the WhatsApp group continues to track drug use around the centre. Its members still urge one another to hold the centre to account but have mostly given up thinking that the centre itself will be a source of change.

Pre-Covid, the centre used to hold open houses regularly. In early 2024, it decided to do so again, ostensibly to reconnect with the community but perhaps also to dispel misconceptions. I attended one in January. I was greeted by Altenberg and directed to speak with Anne Marie Aikins. A veteran PR manager, most recently with Metrolinx, she was enlisted by the centre—now in crisis mode—to assist in its communication strategy. The open house was clearly meant to showcase the centre’s variety of offerings—the diabetes clinic, family medicine—and underscore the centre’s identity beyond the consumption site. Still, the tour took me once again inside KeepSix, where an employee showed us various tools for using drugs. When I asked him what he thought needed to change, he said simply that the city needed more such facilities. Finkle, who was also there that night, later related in the WhatsApp group that he’d bristled at the same employee’s comparison of what was going on outside the centre to people drinking on a restaurant patio and getting increasingly rowdy. Before the employee could respond to Finkle’s rebuke, the tour guide said it was time to move on.

I left the tour thinking about the neighbourhood’s deep divisions and its ideas of what makes a community safe. Just about everyone agrees that it’s critical to keep drug users safe, something that can be accomplished by giving them a supervised place to get high, away from prying eyes, away from the police and with help nearby if something goes wrong. But, for the residents who live closest to the centre, safety is also about not finding needles, not experiencing aggressive behaviour on their streets and, above all else, not getting caught in drug-related violence. The WhatsApp group asserts that the people in the immediate vicinity of the centre bear the brunt of its effects and that people who live farther away can’t understand how bad it can get. That the tension is starkest between the centre and its closest neighbours is clear. Less obvious is whether Leslieville as a whole would be safer if KeepSix went somewhere else.

Working on this story, I often couldn’t help but think of my own evolving feelings about what it means to feel safe. Last July, my partner and I went to Nathan Phillips Square to attend an outdoor art show. Heading there on the streetcar, we sat a few feet away from a man talking loudly to himself. When a fellow passenger asked him what the problem was, the man pulled a knife on him. The passenger immediately got on his knees and put his hands in the air, attempting to defuse what was now a terrifying situation. Someone else pressed an emergency alarm, and everyone in the back scattered. The man got off. So did we. The next streetcar arrived, and we carried on our way as best we could. But I had trouble shaking the sheer bodily fear of it, and even now, I find myself out in public, eyes darting around distrustfully, anyone a possible threat. It may not be rational, but fear rarely is. A minor incident on a streetcar was enough to make me question my own sense of security—and, at least to some extent, my politics. I’ve identified as a leftist my entire adult life. What is the appropriate progressive response to feeling unsafe, even temporarily, even if it’s irrational? And what does that response become when one’s sense of safety is threatened not just once but every day?

The pandemic showed us that issues of public health aren’t straightforward. What’s going on in Leslieville is charged and complex. The fight playing out there around the opioid crisis is playing out across the country and at all levels of government. Last year, BC went down the road of decriminalization via a pilot program that allowed adults to carry small amounts of illegal substances. But it walked back its experiment this past April after urban mayors and health care workers raised the alarm about widespread public drug use. Alberta is taking another path altogether, focusing not on supervised consumption but on recovery. It’s an approach championed by Marshall Smith, Premier Danielle Smith’s chief of staff, who was himself once homeless and addicted to drugs. Tangibly, it means investing in free access to publicly funded addiction centres, more treatment beds and same-day access to addiction medications. Here in Toronto, the city’s outgoing medical officer of health, Eileen de Villa, has been pushing for the decriminalization of small amounts of illegal drugs for personal use—a request that the province has forcefully and categorically dismissed as “misguided.” In a letter sent to de Villa in May, health minister Sylvia Jones and solicitor general Michael Kerzner wrote, “While our government has already been perfectly clear on multiple occasions, please consider this as formal as possible: Ontario is 100 per cent opposed to your proposal.”

Leslieville is at an impasse precisely because solving the issue of where a supervised consumption site belongs—at the heart of a neighbourhood or on its edges—also means addressing myriad other city issues, including the opioid crisis and the housing crisis. Questions abound. Namely, who gets to decide what—and who—belongs in a gentrifying neighbourhood? Is it the residents who have moved in and now call the place home, or the marginalized people who were there first and need services? Brokering peace between the increasingly entrenched sides in Leslieville would, at the very least, require some assumptions of good faith and trust—trust that seems hopelessly broken. And underneath it all, an uncomfortable, devilish conundrum: Whose lives matter most? It’s a question no one seems to want to answer.

This story originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe for just $39.99 a year, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.