Bill 6, Ontario’s “Safer Municipalities Act”, is now law. Despite being framed as a public safety measure, its real effect is to deepen a long-standing colonial pattern: punishing poverty, expanding police control over public space and displacing Indigenous people from their communities. This should concern us all.
Rather than addressing the root causes of the toxic drug crisis – an unsafe drug supply, inadequate housing, and chronic underinvestment in community-led care – Bill 6 relies on enforcement, punishment, and removal. This leads to isolation and more preventable deaths.
Policing, Displacement, and Criminalization
Bill 6 prohibits “the public consumption of illegal substances” in public spaces, with the government’s stated goal being the “clearing of encampments by enhancing penalties.” In practice, the bill widens police discretion. It authorizes warrantless arrests and removals from public space based on a broad and subjective “reasonable grounds” standard, increasing the likelihood of police surveillance and enforcement against people who are visibly unhoused or perceived to be using drugs.
For people living in encampments, removal from public space often means losing access to community, harm reduction supplies, and informal safety networks that reduce the risk of overdose. Bill 6 compounds this harm by treating a person’s return to a public space after being removed as an aggravating factor in sentencing – meaning people who are unhoused could face harsher penalties simply for going back to where they live.
Amnesty International is concerned that these expanded powers will be weaponized against communities already disproportionately targeted by police violence.
The law offers an exemption for drug use in safe consumption sites. Yet 2024’s Bill 223 has limited these very services, with 10 life-saving sites mandated to close, rendering the exemption hollow.
People who use drugs face an impossible choice: stay in encampments and use community-based harm-reduction strategies to stay safe, while risking violent criminalization, or leave and face a higher risk of overdose alone.
Disproportionate Harm to Indigenous Communities
Indigenous people are especially impacted by Bill 6. They are overrepresented among those living outdoors, using drugs, and within the carceral system. They also experience police violence at far higher rates.
Indigenous women face compounded and gendered harms. Factors such as poverty, inadequate housing, gendered violence, and systemic discrimination increase their vulnerability to criminalization. They are disproportionately represented in arrests and time held in custody, contributing to the overrepresentation of Indigenous women in Canada’s carceral system. Bill 6 only creates another means by which Indigenous women can be targeted and punished.
In response to these impacts, Mskwaasin Agnew of Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction shared, “The social determinants of health for Indigenous people are just as important to sovereignty and autonomy as land and water. The toxic drug supply claiming the lives of Indigenous people is the continuation of genocide. Our relatives deserve one more sunrise.”
Removing Indigenous people from their lands and traditional territories, wherever it occurs, is a violation of their sovereignty. It cannot be separated from the history of forced displacement from their traditional territories. The displacement of Indigenous people who use drugs from encampments undermines their control over their bodies and communities, amplifying the ongoing violence of colonization.
A Different Path Forward
People who use drugs have fundamental rights that must be respected and protected. Amnesty International is concerned that Bill 6 threatens these rights, including the right to life and security, unreasonable search and seizure, freedom from arbitrary detention, and equality rights.
Ontario does not need more punitive laws. Ontario must repeal Bill 6 and Bill 223 now and prioritize investing in community-led harm reduction strategies that inspire a collective-responsibility to save lives immediately.
What you can do
Ontario has passed two dangerous laws. Bill 6 and Bill 223 expand policing, shut down life-saving safe consumption sites, and criminalize people for suspected drug use outdoors.
These laws will increase overdose deaths, push people out of encampments, and disproportionately harm Indigenous people, who already face higher rates of homelessness, policing, incarceration, and gendered violence.
People who use drugs have fundamental rights that must be respected and protected.
Take action now: Call on the Ontario government to repeal Bill 6 and Bill 223 and invest in community-led harm reduction.
