Ontario’s opioid strategy, even with its new abstinence-based model for treatment, is outdated and does not serve the current needs of the people, the auditor general found in her annual report released Tuesday.
Shelley Spence said the province needs to develop a new comprehensive strategy to deal with the opioid crisis as the current one has not been updated since 2016.
More than 2,600 Ontarians died last year due to overdoses, the vast majority due to opioid toxicity.
“We concluded that the ministry does not have effective processes in place to meet the challenging and changing nature of the opioid crisis in Ontario,” Spence wrote.
Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government has taken a hard line on drug-consumption sites, passing legislation that prohibits and closes any sites within 200 metres of a school or daycare, and effectively prohibits any new sites from opening.
In their place, the government is launching 19 new “homelessness and addiction recovery treatment hubs,” plus 375 highly supportive housing units at a planned cost of $378 million.
Health workers, advocates and users of the sites have warned of a spike in deaths when the sites close by March 31, 2025.
Multiple branches of ministries are responsible for managing different parts of the opioid crisis with no one entity taking the lead, the auditor found. There are no goals or targets to meet and the province has poor data tracking on the issue, Spence said.
Only 10 of 24 performance indicators were tracked by the province. The remainder were either not tracked at all or monitored inconsistently.
Spence found a lack of data on the number and rate of hospitalizations for opioid overdoses and the percentage of people prescribed opioids who then develop an addiction, among other oversights.
The auditor general also took aim at the province’s homelessness hub model that Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced in August.
The ministry did not provide a thorough, evidence-based business case for the new hub model and did not provide proper impact analysis or do proper consultations with all affected people, Spence found.
“The ministry has not developed plans to mitigate the risks prior to making the decision, which include the number of impacted individuals, the increased overdoses and risk of death, and the financial and operational burden on emergency departments,” Spence said.
The ministry has accepted all seven of the auditor general’s recommendations, including the need to develop a new opioid strategy.