10/03/2025
A worthy read that mirrors the experience of peaceful Pembroke residents, who continually battle a fringe group that distorts cries for common sense and denies childrens rights to safety and protection from concurrent harms of toxic drug use
The truth is, every community that challenges these programs is painted (by city staff/program providers and their donors) as a hostile NIMBY.
✅Visit safeinpembroke.org for quick links to inform our Mayor and Councillors what you think.
Derek Finkle: Academics trying to gaslight residents terrorized by safe injection site crime.
Rather than acknowledge the harm caused by such facilities, activists are attempting to slander the victims
By Derek Finkle, Special to National Post Published Oct 01, 2025
Residents near an injection site in the west Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale have been raising concerns for years about illegal drug activity around the perimeter of the site. They were hoping some solutions would be tabled when the executive director of the Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre, Angela Robertson, called a meeting on July 17 to address the community’s escalating concerns, including a disturbing video of a fight in an adjoining park while a member of the site’s controversial security firm looked on.
The morning of the meeting, at least 10 residents who had previously expressed concerns to Robertson woke up to discover the words “NIMBY NEIGHBORHOOD” spray-painted on their sidewalks, with arrows pointing towards their front doors.
The graffiti, clearly intended to intimidate and silence the residents who might speak critically of the management of the injection site, foreshadowed the evening’s meeting, which was hijacked by activists to minimize the chance of residents getting the opportunity to voice their concerns.
As a result, the frustrated residents created their own group, Residents for a Safe Parkdale, and decided it was time to take their concerns over Robertson’s head.
In a letter addressed to federal, provincial and municipal politicians, oversight bodies and senior police officials, the group detailed many specific examples, with supporting photographic evidence, of “the ongoing drug-fuelled disorder and chaos on and around the site,” including melees, rampant public drug use, off-leash pit bulls, drug dealing, fires, destruction of park trees, trespassing and theft on nearby private properties and ubiquitous drug paraphernalia around the site.
At first, Robertson deflected by blaming larger societal issues for the drug activity on her health centre’s property. But Residents for a Safe Parkdale insisted she take responsibility for it. They continued to send more photos and videos of the chaos.
Their case was bolstered by a Canadian Press story about the site, in which the reporter witnessed a drug deal in the health centre’s park. The health centre promised back in 2016 that it would have “zero-tolerance” towards drug dealing but clearly failed to enforce the policy.
Towards the end of August, Robertson announced that the centre was installing “temporary fencing” around the park. Within hours of the fence being erected, a half dozen signs were affixed to it from the inside. One sign read: “DANGER DUE TO: Violent Displacement by NIMBYs.”
Residents for a Safe Parkdale demanded the removal of the signs maligning the neighbours who had voiced safety concerns, and that Robertson share her centre’s security footage to determine who had erected the signs. The residents wanted to confirm their suspicions that the signs had been put up by injection site staff. The signs were ultimately taken down, but no security footage was forthcoming.
In September, headlines around the country reflected the battle playing out in Parkdale. Several cities, including Smithers, B.C., and Barrie, Ont., declared states of emergency as a result of public disorder caused by the fentanyl crisis.
Residents in Montreal received $12,000 from a non-profit to fund class-action lawsuits against local governments for failing to enact policies to combat the crime and lawlessness caused by drug addiction and homelessness. And Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew terminated a proposed injection site in Winnipeg after residents, who were already fed up with crime, demanded details about the secretive site.
In the midst of all this, a downtown Toronto condo sued a neighbouring drop-in centre for $2.3 million as a result of the “aggressive” and “violent” behaviour its residents had been subjected to by the “illegal, illicit, disruptive, interfering and egregious conduct” it had allowed “to occur on its property.”
Talking to CTV News, Luisa Sotomayor, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, chided “residents of luxury condos” for “redefining what it means to live downtown.… They want the location, the specific lifestyle, but seeing poverty is not part of that equation. It doesn’t align with the gentrified aesthetic values.” She further claimed that the lawsuit is “a battle for who belongs.”
As a matter of fact, professor, it isn’t. What’s at issue is threatening, drug-fuelled disorder, not the mere existence of people living in poverty.
These sentiments are part of a growing trend in recent months among far-left activists, in which crime, illegal drug activity and the permanent brain damage wrought by fentanyl are being increasingly sanitized and re-framed as traditional homelessness that has nothing to do with fentanyl.
Such activists seem to think the solution to homelessness is providing each drug encampment resident across the country with a key to their own bungalow (or, as the encampment residents of Dufferin Grove Park in Toronto are apparently demanding, 800-square-foot condos of their choosing from the city).
These activists are at odds with mayors across the country, such as Smithers Mayor Gladys Atrill, who said, “You can’t just move” people out of encampments because they won’t be able to function in shelters or community housing, and instead “require complex, long-term care.”
Some of Sotomayor’s like-minded academics recently decided to bestow a $70,000 Insight Development Grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to a project called “Narratives for Coexisting: Supervised Consumption Sites, Parenting and the Settler Colonialism of Public Safety.”
The precis for this project states that it seeks to examine “the invocation of narratives about child safety, parenting and the family unit in the justification of closing essential health services provided by supervised consumption sites in Ontario,” and “analyze the role of gentrification, NIMBYism, colonialism and history in narratives about neighbourhood safety and children.”
The project is being run by Gillian Kolla, who’s known for penning an activist academic paper that framed criticism of the now-defunded federal “safer supply” experiment as a “moral panic,” and Jane Griffith, who appears to be an expert not on injection sites, but on “settler colonialism.”
As this is all happening, Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim, one of the drug dealers accused of being involved in a gunfight outside a now-closed injection site I lived across the street from in Toronto’s Leslieville neighbourhood that resulted in the death of Karolina Huebner-Makurat, a mother of two young girls, plead guilty to manslaughter.
A video of the drug-dealer-on-drug-dealer crime that led to the tragedy involving Huebner-Makurat has once again traumatized our neighbourhood, just as trauma was thrust upon us months ago when one of the site’s employees pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting Ibrahim as he was escaping the scene.
So, no, just like Parkdale, our neighbourhood is not too thrilled about being gaslit, delegitimized and even slandered as intolerant NIMBYs by vendetta-fuelled, ideologically driven, bad-faith “academic research “.
