High hopes for city’s new mental health, addictions recovery centre

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Premier Doug Ford helped cut the ribbon to open a new recovery centre in Owen Sound Friday and said more like it are needed across Ontario.

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“This is what we need. Not only here in Grey-Bruce but we need it right across the province,” he said just inside the front doors of the 45-bed, $24-million Brightshores Mental Health and Addictions Wellness and Recovery Centre, in the renovated former Bayview Public School building. 

The province helped fund the facility using the $90 million addiction recovery fund. The provincial and federal governments are investing “over $3.8 billion when it comes to mental health and addiction,” he said. 

“I am very passionate — before I came into this job and this role — of helping people with mental health and addiction,” he said. “We can get through the challenges if we give them the proper support they need.” 

He noted Ontario was the first province in Canada to have a minister specifically dedicated to this field — Michael Tibollo, the associate minister of mental health and addictions. Two years ago, he approved 36 new beds to expand mental health and addictions treatment. 

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Tibollo told about 50 people at the ribbon-cutting, including police, paramedics, local politicians and hospital staff, that more treatment and recovery centres are being built in North Bay, Sudbury, Woodstock, Belleville, Brockville, Thunder Bay and possibly Windsor. 

“We’re building these everywhere we know they’ve had issues with respect to overdoses and they need that treatment and support,” Tibollo said, who added in an interview “The recidivism rates drop below 15 per cent when you provide the services close to home.” 

The centre will take pressure off police and hospitals, he said, and it will help people who need help get past the initial crisis and then provide follow-up care and help them find work, a place to live and to reintegrate into society — all from the same facility.  

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“It’s the first of its kind,” Tibollo said of the Owen Sound facility, which serves Grey-Bruce. 

“It’s transformational and it will be a model that will be followed everywhere in the world,” he said, because people with addictions and mental health struggles need a local place they can go to get better, and hospitals aren’t equipped for that, Tibollo said. 

He noted the province didn’t have money to pay the project’s capital costs, such as the land, building and renovations to the former Bayview Public School. The province is funding the beds. Local funding paid for the facility, he noted.

Owen Sound Mayor Ian Boddy said after the event that the centre will cause “a huge change in the Grey-Bruce region.” He noted recent overdoses and said “this gives us a chance to help people get better and I think it’s so important and will have a big impact.”

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The local health unit reported seven non-fatal overdoses occurred in Grey-Bruce, six in Owen Sound, in the first five days of June.

“I’m certainly hoping it frees up time in terms of the emergency department and presents opportunities for people to get better so that we don’t have the revolving door that we’re often seeing now,” City Police Chief Craig Ambrose said in an interview.  

Ann Ford, Brightshores Health System’s president and CEO, said afterwards the location for the new centre is good because its central. She praised donors who helped fund the new facility, which also was paid for with hospital surpluses. 

There was little evidence of anti-Ford protesters, unlike the last time Ford and his deputy premier, Health Minister Sylvia Jones, were in the area to open Markdale’s new hospital last September. 

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But Dave Low, one of the wellness centre’s neighbours, stood outside of his house with a sign asking the premier to buy the house Low’s family has owned for 70 years. Now that the addiction and mental health treatment centre is down the street, he suspects his property value has dropped. He said the centre is needed but doesn’t belong in a residential area. 

There was also a lawn sign near the centre and posters on a pole at the entrance to the centre’s dead-end street denouncing privatized health care, a reference to the Ford government’s expansion of private clinics to reduce wait times for certain surgeries and diagnostic imaging — which critics argue starves an already underfunded public health-care system of funding and staff. 

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The centre will receive its first patients on June 18, when all 21 current withdrawal management patients will move from the present detox centre on 9th Avenue East and will fill all of the new centre’s 21 dedicated withdrawal management beds. 

The centre also has 14 relapse prevention and treatment beds and 10 supportive studio units for longer term stays — a first for the Grey-Bruce area. The centre is unique also in that it combines inpatients and outpatients in the same building. 

About 65 full-time staff or the equivalent will work there, about 36 of whom were hired for the new facility. New staff include those for recreational therapy, vocational skills training, spiritual care and some crisis services. 

The centre will include the Rapid Access Addiction Medicine Clinic, the Community Addiction Treatment Services, withdrawal management services, the Assertive Community Treatment Team, the Concurrent Disorders Case Management Team, counselling services, and psychiatrists. 

Brightshores donors and other invited guests will get a sneak peek at the facility on June 17. A public open house will also take place that day, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., at 615 6th St. ‘A’ E. in Owen Sound. 

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