Shoemaker calls out Queen's Park inaction on opioid file

Sault Ste. Marie’s mayor says the city’s consistently high rates of opioid-related deaths only proves that more needs to be done to make additional services available to people living with addiction. 

As SooToday reported last week, the Office of Ontario's Chief Coroner released the most recent statistics for opioid mortality across the province. Those per-capita stats placed Sault Ste. Marie third worst in the province for all of 2022 — and worst in the province for the final quarter of the same year.

Only Thunder Bay and Sudbury had higher opioid-related death rates for the 2022 calendar year in Ontario.

Asked for his reaction to the Sault’s continually high rates of opioid-related deaths, Mayor Matthew Shoemaker expressed his frustration.

“It seems the further away you got from the Ministry of Health’s head offices in Toronto, the worse your statistics are,” said Shoemaker. ”It seems obvious to me the sort of out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality of Queen’s Park is continuing to play itself out in the health care field and across the north.”

The mayor said he continues to be in regular discussions with the Sault’s member of provincial parliament, Ross Romano.

“He is in support of these kinds of services and we need to strategize how our municipality can get its share of provincial funding,” he said.

There is a disparity in the number of services available in northern Ontario versus those in southern Ontario, he said.

“I think the statistics reinforce that every kind of service, everything we can get to assist in combating the obvious epidemic we are facing, is necessary because things are exponentially worse from a statistics standpoint in terms of overdoses and deaths here than they are in the rest of the province, other than Thunder Bay,” said Shoemaker.

A supervised consumption site and the return of the concurrent disorders day treatment program are on the top of Shoemaker’s list to complement the services currently available in the Sault.

The most recent statistics from the Chief Coroner show the opioid-related death rate in the Algoma Public Health unit was 48 deaths per 100,000 people in 2022. That’s almost three times the provincial average of 17.6 per 100,000.

When looking at only the city of Sault Ste. Marie, that rate was 61.1 per 100,000 people for the same year, second worst in the province behind only Thunder Bay.

“I just wish we were better positioned and I hope that when we get the services in place — and that we hope to have in place and I am hopeful we will have all of the services we need at some point — that our ranking will correspondingly fall on the list to a position we would be more willing to accept,” said Shoemaker.