Recovery First Ottawa
Stronger communities / addiction and recovery
Recovery First Ottawa.
For a decade, Ottawa’s response to addiction has been built around one goal: keeping people alive tonight. That matters. But almost nothing has been built for tomorrow.
The city hands out needles and pipes from an office in the ByWard Market and a van that runs until 11:30 every night. Paramedics and outreach workers revive the same people again and again. An overdose can starve the brain of oxygen, and naloxone restores breathing but can’t undo damage that’s already done. In Ontario, one in five people who survive an overdose overdose again within a year. Almost one in ten die.
And when someone finally says “I want out,” the door is barely there. Ottawa has about 38 withdrawal management beds for a city of more than a million people, and only 12 of them are medical. Detox without a next step is a revolving door: people leave with their tolerance gone, go back to the same corner, and face the highest risk of dying they will ever face.
That’s compassion without competence. It feels kind. It keeps people sick.
Recovery First Ottawa changes the goal. Naloxone stays. But the city’s energy goes into detox when someone asks for it, treatment the same day, up to ten months at a recovery campus learning a trade, and a job and a home at the end. Treatment is paid for by the province. The campus is built in Ottawa.
Our communities are paying the price.
The people caught in addiction pay first. Their neighbourhoods pay next, and so does every family that has started to wonder whether the park down the street is safe.
Ottawa recovered 35,917 discarded needles in 2025, along with 35,897 glass pipes, and is on pace to beat that this year. In February 2024, a two-year-old put a used syringe in her mouth at a west-end Ottawa park and was rushed to CHEO. This spring, the school bus authority started busing children who live within walking distance of five downtown schools because their routes pass open drug use. Bank Street business owners say theft, public drug use and property damage are driving customers away.
Take-home pills prescribed to keep people safe are being diverted and traded for fentanyl. One in five Ottawa students in grades 7 to 12 reported using prescription opioid pain relievers non-medically in 2023, double the rate two years earlier. And 207 people died of opioid overdoses in Ottawa in 2023, more than three times the 65 who died in 2019.
Everyone pays the bill. Opioid use cost Canada $7.1 billion in 2020, most of it in lost productivity, policing, courts and health care. Every overdose call ties up paramedics, police and firefighters, and paramedic overdose calls in Ottawa rose 52 percent in the first five months of 2026.
A bridge to nowhere.
Ottawa leaned on one strategy, harm reduction without a way out, and treated it as the whole answer. Supervised sites, supplies and take-home “safer supply” were meant to be a bridge to treatment. For most people, the bridge led nowhere.
The province has now shut down the consumption sites. Ottawa’s last two closed in June 2026. But nothing has been built to replace them at the scale the city needs. The old model is gone, and the new one hasn’t been built.
Zurich learned this lesson more than 30 years ago. When police cleared its infamous “Needle Park” in 1992 with no support in place, the open drug scene simply moved down the road. It took building real treatment capacity before the second clearance, in 1995, made it stick. The lesson for Ottawa is the order of operations. Build the way out first. Then take back the street.
Others have walked the other road already.
Some voices in Ottawa want to go further down the road the city has been on: decriminalization and a regulated supply of drugs. British Columbia decriminalized hard drugs in 2023, recriminalized public drug use in 2024, and in January 2026 let the experiment expire because it “has not delivered the results we hoped for.” Oregon decriminalized all drugs in 2020 and recriminalized possession in 2024. San Francisco went all in on low-barrier harm reduction, hit a record 810 overdose deaths in 2023, and in 2025 passed a “Recovery First” law that makes long-term recovery its primary goal.
Ottawa shouldn’t spend the next five years learning a lesson these places have already paid for.
The plan: seven commitments
A 200-bed campus on leased Greenbelt land, built with the National Capital Commission in two phases of 100 beds, with treatment paid for by the province. Residents stay up to ten months, train in food and agriculture, building maintenance or the construction trades, and leave with a job, a place to live and a year of aftercare.
Ottawa has about 38 withdrawal management beds, and only 12 of them are medical. Alex will press Ontario to put real beds behind the withdrawal management its HART hubs promise in Ottawa, with same-day transfer to treatment. Nobody should walk out of detox and back to the same corner.
Make long-acting buprenorphine, a once-a-month injection sold as Sublocade, the standard offer after detox, and make it available in clinics, pharmacies and family practices across the city, not just downtown. One injection a month leaves nothing to sell on the street.
If an opioid is prescribed, it should be taken in front of a nurse or pharmacist. British Columbia moved every patient to witnessed dosing in 2025. Ontario’s doctors’ regulator is considering the same change this month. Alex supports it, and if it stalls, Ottawa will ask Queen’s Park to require it.
City-funded agencies will report how many people they move into treatment, recovery, housing and work, not how many supplies they hand out. The city will also publish exactly what it spends on harm reduction supplies. Today you can’t find the number.
Alex fully supports police enforcement against dealers. Police and special constables will enforce Ontario’s new ban on public drug use, starting with schools, parks, transit and main streets, and courts can attach treatment conditions to those tickets.
Every person picked up needs somewhere safe to go. Ottawa will put a nurse in the Ottawa Police cells at 474 Elgin Street, where people drunk in public are already held to sober up. It will open a Sobering Unit, a medically staffed place where police and paramedics can bring people who are intoxicated in public, modelled on Winnipeg’s Protective Care, which takes more than 11,000 people a year, with staff connecting each person to detox and treatment before they leave. And it will ask Queen’s Park to give police the same power to bring someone who is dangerously high on drugs to safety that they already have for alcohol.
Naloxone stays everywhere. You can’t recover if you’re dead.
Recovery is half the answer. Keeping kids from starting is the other half. Read our youth prevention plan, An Ounce of Prevention.
The HopeWorks Recovery Campus.
A 200-bed recovery campus on Greenbelt land where people spend up to ten months rebuilding their lives and learning a trade, then leave with a job, a place to live and a year of support. Phase one opens 100 beds and proves the model. Phase two adds 100 more. At ten months a stay, 200 beds serve about 240 people a year.
How it works
At the Montfort, The Royal or a HART hub.
Straight to the campus, with medication like Sublocade started or continued, so there is no gap between asking for help and getting it.
Counselling, medical and mental health care, and a daily routine.
Each resident picks a trade track and works it every day.
Job placement with Ottawa employers and a housing exit.
Regular check-ins, medication, peer support and a place to call when things get hard. The most dangerous time is the weeks after leaving, so support doesn’t stop at the gate.
Why ten months? The research is clear that 90 days is the minimum for residential treatment to work, and stays of six months or more show better results. No study shows twelve months beats ten. What matters most is that nobody leaves to nothing, which is why every resident gets a year of aftercare.
Three trade tracks
Greenhouses, fields, a commercial kitchen and catering, with produce and meals sold to Ottawa restaurants and markets. It builds on proven food service training programs already run by Ottawa’s non-profit sector.
Keeping the campus running: repairs, heating and cooling basics, grounds and property care. It builds on proven maintenance training programs already run by Ottawa’s non-profit sector.
Carpentry, framing, drywall, painting and finishing, with pre-apprenticeship training and micro-certifications residents can take straight to an employer. Residents help build and renovate the campus and its heritage barns.
Why the Greenbelt.
Every proposal to put a shelter or treatment centre in a residential area runs into the same wall, and residents have a point: nobody wants it next to their kids’ school or their front door. The Greenbelt isn’t a neighbourhood. It’s farmland, forest and open space between neighbourhoods, already managed by the NCC, with 5,400 hectares rented to farmers and 84 heritage barns. A recovery campus there gives people the space and distance they need to recover, without putting it on anyone’s block.
It will not be a locked facility, and it will not be a place without medication. People leave with a plan, not a bus ticket.
Built on what works.
Alberta’s Red Deer Recovery Community has 75 beds, is paid for by the province and is run by a private operator at no cost to residents. Philadelphia opened the 340-bed Riverview Wellness Village, and overdose deaths there fell from 1,069 in 2024 to 747 in 2025 (preliminary). San Francisco opened 279 new recovery and treatment beds, and its deaths fell from 810 in 2023 to 621 in 2025 (preliminary). Winnipeg’s Protective Care takes more than 11,000 intakes a year. San Patrignano in Italy houses about 850 residents, and its farm, food and craft businesses fund about 65 percent of its budget.
The province pays for treatment.
Health care is the province’s job, so the province pays for treatment: beds, detox, medication, clinical staff and operating costs. Ontario has already committed nearly $550 million to HART hubs, and the Premier has said the province needs to build more treatment capacity. Ottawa’s job is to bring a ready-to-build plan and fight for its share.
The National Capital Commission provides a long-term lease of Greenbelt land and barns. Housing programs provide recovery housing units and the housing exit. The City of Ottawa brings fast-tracked approvals, transit access, and existing addiction contracts redirected to results-based funding. No new property tax. Campus revenue from produce, catering, and maintenance and renovation work covers part of operations. Private partners can help with buildings, training and jobs, with every partner and every dollar disclosed publicly. Treatment decisions stay with clinicians.
Ottawa would pick its operator through an open tender, open to Ottawa non-profits and experienced private providers. Private residential treatment in Ontario costs up to $14,250 a month. HopeWorks will be free to residents.
When it happens
A council motion endorsing Recovery First Ottawa and requesting provincial funding. A letter to the Premier asking for Ottawa to be the pilot city for detox-to-recovery. Talks with the NCC on a Greenbelt site. A review of every city-funded addiction contract, with results targets. Public data on detox wait times and needle pickups, posted every quarter. A request to Ottawa Police to put a nurse in the Elgin Street cells.
A site chosen with the NCC, the neighbours and the ward councillor at the table before it’s announced, a provincial business case submitted and an operator tender issued.
Design and approvals, with detox-to-treatment transfers running at the HART hubs, and the Sobering Unit open.
Construction and the first 100 residents. Phase two follows.
Measure what counts.
I’m a carpenter. On a job site, nobody measures progress by how many times they patched the same leak. You fix it, and you check that it held.
For ten years, Ottawa has measured its response to addiction by how many kits went out the door and how many overdoses were reversed. Those numbers matter. But they don’t tell you whether anyone got better.
This plan measures the thing that counts: how many people got from detox to treatment, from treatment to work, and from work to a home of their own.
You can’t have compassion without competence.
Read the full plan, with every source (PDF)
We’ve got a lot of work to do.
Ottawa deserves better.