An Ottawa city councillor is calling the mayor's decision to block provincial funding for the pop-up safe injection site in Lowertown "heartless."
Earlier this week, Mayor Jim Watson declined provincial help to "winterize" the unsanctioned supervised injection site, operated by Overdose Prevention Ottawa (OPO), in Raphael Brunet Park.
Kitichissippi Councillor Jeff Leiper says he wants to know why council wasn't involved in that call.
"This is such a major decision that it should have been made by city council," he told CTV News. "The province asked the City of Ottawa whether or not it wanted this help and there is only one body that speaks for the City and that's council."
Some have called the Mayor's decision an attempt to force OPO out of the park as winter approaches.
"Temperatures are plunging," Leiper said. "They're in for a rough time in Raphael Brunet Park and the aid that was being offered by the province would have very much helped."
Despite sanctioned sites in the area, Leiper says drug users are still going to the site in the park, suggesting there's still a need to keep the OPO site open.
"We hear that it's a safer space, it's a more comfortable space," he said. "Until we know the other sites are going to be a functional replacement for that, it's premature to start trying to find ways to freeze them out."
Ottawa Public Health opened a temporary safe injection site on Clarence Street in September. A mobile supervised injection site, operated by Ottawa Inner City Health, is set to open in a trailer in the coming days, pending Health Canada approval. Organizers say they expect more than 100 people to visit that site, outside the Shepherds of Good Hope, every day.