Derek Finkle: Toronto election a choice between drug-fuelled crime and safe streets

Almost exactly a year before Toronto’s upcoming municipal election on Oct. 26, a packed town hall in the downtown ward of Toronto Centre served as a preview of the brewing fury constituents had for the city’s embrace of harm reduction as the primary response to the illegal fentanyl crisis.

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A young man in the front row stood up when it was his turn to speak and looked at the city councillor for Toronto Centre, Chris Moise. “You keep saying ‘harm reduction,’ ” he began. “Whose harm are you reducing by saying that?”

As fellow residents applauded, the constituent walked over to a nearby window that had been covered with makeshift blinds, which he pulled back to reveal a bustling, drug-fuelled encampment outside.

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“This is (the) absolute filth and disgusting state of the park and the city,” he said to Moise. “Get the drug dealers off the streets, lock them up and deal with the situation in the parks.”

Moise was in a tough spot. He was (and still is) the chair of the Toronto Board of Health and has been an outspoken proponent of harm reduction and injection sites.

Moise tried explaining that he can’t control who comes to his ward from the suburbs or neighbouring towns. But the questioner wasn’t having it. “This neighbourhood enables it,” he interjected. “We give them harm supplies — needles, crack pipes, foils and everything else.”

He asked Moise why Toronto’s wealthy Forest Hill neighbourhood doesn’t have this problem. Before Moise could answer, the constituent did so for him: “Because they don’t allow that. And you are allowing it. And city council’s allowing it and they’re concentrating it into this neighbourhood. And that’s what’s happening with George Hislop Park.”

The person who captured this exchange on his phone was another constituent from Toronto Centre named Daniel Tate. About a year earlier, Tate started an advocacy group called IntegrityTO, whose chief purpose is to hold elected city officials to account for what he saw as the decaying state of Toronto.

IntegrityTO made some waves protesting the renaming Toronto’s famous Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square, a move that had been spearheaded by Moise as a symbol of “decolonization.” But IntegrityTO was also building a considerable following by continually highlighting rampant open drug use, encampments in city parks and garbage-strewn streets.

In January, Tate delivered a taxpayers’ land acknowledgement before a City of Toronto budget subcommittee that went viral. More recently, he announced that he is running to replace Moise as the city councillor for Toronto Centre. One could not find two people more diametrically opposed in their approaches to the illegal fentanyl crisis.

While Tate is not a fan of harm reduction, Moise is far from the only city councillor getting lambasted for being a devoted cheerleader for it. The councillor for Spadina—Fort York, Deputy Mayor Ausma Malik, has also been taking heat over her elusiveness with constituents when it comes to complaints about drug disorder and homelessness.

When Malik’s constituents asked her to attend a community protest in 2023 over a planned large-scale, low-barrier, 24-hour facility providing meals and other services to the homeless in a residential community next to a school, Malik stayed home.

This summer, the same community was demanding that Malik do something about the drug-fuelled chaos outside of a city-funded drop-in centre called West Neighbourhood House. The best response Malik seems to have been able to muster is a note on her website promising that, “A comprehensive action plan is currently being developed.”

On Sept. 14, West Neighbourhood House held a “community check-in” meeting. While Malik is said to have made a brief appearance, several attendees told me there was no update from her on her plans.

Also present at the meeting was a candidate looking to replace Malik at city council named Ian Cunningham. On Cunningham’s campaign website, “Recovery, Housing & Safer Communities” are listed together as his top priority. A volunteer of Cunningham’s told me that drug addiction has consistently been the No. 1 concern voiced by residents and businesses during their canvassing of the ward.

In the nearby ward of Parkdale—High Park, there is a heated race to fill the gap left when Gord Perks, who represented the ward for two decades, announced his retirement earlier this year. Perks’ parting words on his final day in city council in July didn’t come as a total surprise, given his political leanings. “Capitalism is trash,” declared Perks, a sentiment applauded by many of his fellow councillors and agreed to by one of the candidates vying to succeed him, Diana Chan McNally.

Chan McNally, who describes herself as a “front-line community worker, arts worker and advocate,” has been a vocal activist when it comes to her support for injection sites and the rights of homeless people to build encampments in public parks.

When a group in her ward called Residents for a Safe Parkdale began sending officials photographic evidence of violence, needles and disorder outside of an injection site in the summer of 2025, it prompted the Ontario government to defund the site a few months later. In December, the group released a subsequent email citing a social media post they claimed had been written by Chan McNally calling Residents for a Safe Parkdale “opponents,” whose emails about community safety concerns were “reactionary fodder.”

The group’s chief grievance about this post, however, was that Chan McNally allegedly claimed to have obtained “all of their names and emails.” I reached out to Chan McNally to give her an opportunity to respond to the group’s complaints about this post, specifically their desire to know how she had come to possess their names and email addresses, which they saw as a privacy violation. Chan McNally did not respond prior to my deadline.

In her online platform, Chan McNally claims that all constituents “deserve to have our voices heard.” But is she really going to pay any attention to those who voice safety concerns around public drug use and dealing if she considers them “opponents” for doing so?

The platforms of Moise, Malik and Chan McNally all fall under the allegedly “progressive” umbrella of Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow. Chow’s major challenger, Brad Bradford, not surprisingly, is offering a different path forward.

Bradford, like Daniel Tate, is calling for mandatory treatment for those with severe addiction. And he’s not alone. Ontario’s Big City Mayors group recently asked the province to conduct a review of its mental health laws, with an eye to expanding involuntary treatment.

“There’s nothing compassionate about accepting the status quo,” says Bradford. Soon, it will be up to Torontonians to choose.

National Post

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