The Toxic Drug Crisis Is a Labour Issue

The Toxic Drug Crisis is a Labour Issue  

The toxic drug crisis is showing up in workplaces, families and communities across the country. Workers are responding to grief, injury, unsafe conditions and service gaps they did not create and cannot solve alone. Over several decades, government austerity has weakened the public systems we all rely on.^{1 2} Amid this preventable public health emergency, governments are doubling down on stigma and criminalization, causing preventable harm. Labour has a role to play in changing the tide. 

Drug policy affects all of us through how health and housing systems, public services, and communities are structured and resourced. It directly shapes workplace conditions for workers across the country. When governments under-resource our public systems, they displace their responsibility for managing systems failure onto the backs of workers. Across sectors—including library services, health care, municipal services, social services, education, emergency response, shelter services, transit and skilled trades—workers are encountering a consistent structural pattern: public systems are demanding more for less, while workers are expected to hold together what policy has broken. 

This Crisis is Preventable and Policy-driven  

The unregulated toxic drug supply is the predictable outcome of policy choices. Criminalization has pushed the production and sale of drugs into unregulated markets where there are no consumer protections, no quality controls, and no reliable information about ingredients.^{3 4} The result is a preventable mass death and injury crisis that impacts everyone. And it is showing up in workplaces.  

How governments choose to approach drug policy influences working conditions across health care, housing, income supports, and public services. It also determines whether governments invest wisely in these systems or continue to default to harmful enforcement, exclusion and crisis response. Government policy has created risk, and workers are being left to manage the consequences. Today, workers are responding to overdoses, grief, trauma, unsafe conditions, service disruption, and increasing complexity in systems that are already strained.

Workers in Impossible Positions

Years of austerity have reduced the supports available to people, all while expanding frontline workers’ responsibilities.

Across sectors, workers are increasingly required to manage the visible consequences of poverty, homelessness, toxic drug supply, mental distress and unmet care needs, often without adequate staffing, training, or public systems support. That can look like library workers regularly responding to overdoses, or municipal workers being directed to take down tents where people are sheltering in public parks.⁵ It’s an unfair and untenable situation for everyone. But over and over, we’re told to blame the people who are suffering, or the workers who are responding under impossible conditions. The only people who benefit from that blame game are those with the power to change the systems.

People who use drugs, experience poverty, or are unhoused still hold rights to life and dignity. Workers in public-facing or high-pressure jobs still hold rights to safe and fair working conditions. Rather than accept governments shifting blame and system strain onto individuals and workers, we must keep them accountable to uphold those rights.

Labour Knows How to Punch Up  

Labour has a long tradition of challenging power and standing up for people harmed by system failure. From pushing for the expansion of public health care, the development of public childcare systems, and sustained improvements in workplace health and safety standards, the labour movement has refused to be distracted by the tactic of scapegoating individuals for systemic issues. Achieving these wins for everyone was only possibly by maintaining focus on the real issues: structural and institutional responsibilities. 

We can support safety through stable public systems that support both workers and communities, including: 

• Workplace protections and supports  
• Accessible health and social services 
• Adequate staffing and training  

Amid the toxic unregulated drug crisis, labour must resist narratives that pit workers against people in crisis. Labour must punch up and stay focused on institutional and policy responsibilities.  

Stigma Turns Policy Failure into Individual Blame

Stigma is a political tool. When those in power label a group of people as dangerous, irresponsible, or undeserving, it is easier for them to justify exclusionary and punitive policies, rather than fund the structural investments we so desperately need. This approach inaccurately reframes systemic issues—housing, a toxic drug supply, poverty, and services gaps—as individual failures. It positions people in crisis as the problem and forces workers to manage the consequences of policy failure.

In this context, visible suffering becomes the focus of public conversation, with some people stoking fear and blame to drive their own agendas. Governments promise control. Workers are told to manage the consequences. People in crisis are pushed further from safety. And everyone becomes less safe.

To make our workplaces and our communities safer, we must challenge the stigma governments use to justify bad policy.

Public System Gaps Create Private Markets

When our public systems are under-resourced, the needs they are designed to meet don’t disappear. People still need housing, care, treatment and harm reduction. Workers still need staffing, training and safety supports. Without robust public funding, private markets expand to fill the gaps left by austerity policies.

Public systems are relying more and more on private, for-profit companies to provide services like treatment, monitoring, assessment, security and workplace testing.^{6 7} Often these providers operate with uneven accountability and limited system oversights.⁸ That puts people at risk.

Labour has a direct stake in resisting the shift to privatization. Public workers know what happens when governments underfund services, outsource responsibility, and ask private markets to solve the crisis their actions helped create.^{9 10} It is not efficient. It is not safe. It is just a more expensive way to abandon people while asking workers to keep smiling through the collapse.

Safety is a Labour Principle

Drug policy is already shaping workplace conditions, service delivery, and occupational safety across sectors. The Ontario provincial government under Doug Ford has defunded and restricted supervised consumption services across the province, effectively cutting union jobs while pushing more demand and strain onto other workers. Groups like the Ontario Federation of Labour have come out against these harmful policy choices, recognizing the role supervised consumption services play in preventing deaths and injuries and protecting frontline worker safety.¹¹

These conditions are structural, not incidental, in the workplace. A labour-informed response requires:  

• Rejecting stigma as a framework for policy or workplace response
• Strengthening public systems as the foundation of safety
• Ensuring adequate supports for workers
• Insisting governments address the causes of crisis rather than downloading the consequences onto workers

It also means standing with people who are most often blamed, displaced, criminalized, or abandoned.  Those who hold decision-making power want us to believe that the unregulated toxic drug crisis is a story of individuals. But labour has the values, history and traditions to know better: the toxic drug crisis is a story of policy choices, public abandonment, and the consequences of treating some people as disposable. What we need is solidarity. The only way to create real safety for everyone is through collective action, public responsibility, and the refusal to let people with power divide us.

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1. 1 Orly Linovski, “The Many Consequences of Austerity,” Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, April 8, 2024, https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/the-many-consequences-of-austerity/   ↩︎
2. Andrew Longhurst, Damien Contandriopoulos, and Mei-ling Wiedmeyer, “Rejecting the high costs of tax cuts and austerity to our health,” Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, October 17, 2024, https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/health-austerity/ ↩︎
3. Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, “Case for Reform,” Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, https://www.drugpolicy.ca/our-work/case-for-reform/ ↩︎
4. Magnus Nowell, “What makes Canada’s illegal drug supply dangerous?”, Prevention in Focus, CATIE, February 25, 2025, https://www.catie.ca/prevention-in-focus/what-makes-canadas-illegal-drug-supply-dangerous ↩︎
5. Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), “Working in an unsafe consumption site: A library perspective,” Counterpoint, October 16, 2025, https://cupe.ca/counterpoint/working-unsafe-consumption-site-library-perspective ↩︎
6. Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong, “How Privatization Infects the Canadian Health Care System,” New Labor Forum, vol. 32, no. 3 (2023): 42–49, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10957960231194053 ↩︎
7. Noah Schulz, “Health care privatization by stealth,” Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, January 29, 2026, https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/health-care-privatization-by-stealth/ ↩︎
8. Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong, “How Privatization Infects the Canadian Health Care System,” New Labor Forum, vol. 32, no. 3 (2023): 42–49, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10957960231194053 ↩︎
9. Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE), “AUPE will continue to fight Bill 11 to protect public health care,” AUPE News and Updates, https://www.aupe.org/news/news-and-updates/aupe-will-continue-fight-bill-11-protect-public-health-care ↩︎
10. CUPE Ontario, “Five years into Ford government’s privatization of hospital services: longer wait-times, unequal access, and public opposition,” https://cupe.on.ca/five-years-into-ford-governments-privatization/ ↩︎
11. CUPE Ontario, Safe Consumption is a Labour Issue: Workers Call for the Reversal of Deadly SCS Closures in Ontario, https://cupe.on.ca/safeconsumptionisalabourissue/ ↩︎