The mayor of Kingston, Ont. has issued a call to close the city’s Integrated Care Hub on Montreal Street following a deadly incident on Thursday.
Two men and a woman were attacked Thursday morning in and around the Belle Park encampment and on Montreal Street, near the Integrated Care Hub. The men, identified as Taylor Wilkinson, 38, and John Hood, 41, died of their injuries. The unidentified woman remains in hospital.
Andre Wareham, 47, is charged with two counts of second-degree murder and one count of attempted murder.
Mayor Bryan Paterson issued a statement Thursday moments after police confirmed two of the victims had died, calling for the encampment to be dismantled and the Integrated Care Hub to close.
“I will not stand by and wait until more people die – enough is enough,” he said. “We need to clear the encampment, close this safe injection site and the ICH until we can find a better way to support our most vulnerable residents and work with the province to provide treatment and housing solutions.”
Speaking to CTV News Ottawa on Friday, Paterson said he is not against offering services for drug users but takes issue with the Integrated Care Hub model.
“We want to continue to offer services, but in a different way, a different model that doesn’t create an encampment around it that isn’t going to create those issues in the neighborhood,” he said.
“We’ve had so many concerns as a city with what’s been going on in the encampment around the integrated care hub. What I’ve called for is change. There has to be a change.”
Paterson’s comment drew some backlash from residents who argued it would worsen homelessness and the overdose crisis in the city.
“The mayor was responding reactively. I don’t think that would be a good decision at all to close the Integrated Care Hub,” said area resident Leah Broadfoot. “It’s not going to change anything about living in this area. Like they’re still going to be in this area. They’re just not going to have appropriate resources.”
John Done, a lawyer with the Kingston Community Legal Clinic has represented some of the residents of the Belle Park encampment said in a statement Friday that Paterson’s statements are “premature and misguided.”
“How this tragedy developed is the subject of a current police investigation. At this point, there is no evidence of any role the safe injection site, the Integrated Care Hub, and the homeless encampment, had in this tragedy. The location of these events could be important, but they could be proxies for other problems, namely opioid addictions, mental illness, and homelessness. Rushing to judgment was wrong. A better approach would have been to await a full investigation,” Done said.
“Where does Mayor Paterson propose the homeless people residing in the encampment stay? The numbers of homeless people far exceed the number of beds in homeless shelters. The encampment residents are not homeless by choice; they have nowhere else to go. The Integrated Care Hub includes a shelter. By closing the Hub, Mayor Paterson will reduce available shelter beds.”
Done said closing the supervised consumption site would not save lives but instead do the opposite.
The Integrated Care Hub said Thursday it would be closed temporarily while police conduct their investigation.
–With files from CTV News Ottawa’s Jack Richardson