TORONTO — The Canadian Civil Liberties Association expressed profound disappointment and alarm following the Ontario government’s decision to proceed with regulations granting transit enforcement agents sweeping police-equivalent powers — including the authority to arrest, detain, demand identification, and destroy property — in transit spaces that millions of Ontarians depend on every day.
“Ontario has made a deliberate choice to respond to a public health crisis with coercion instead of care,” said Howard Sapers, Executive Director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. “We need solutions that are effective and rights-respecting—not measures that push vulnerable people further to the margins.”
The CCLA has consistently opposed the Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act (RPCISA) since its passage through Bill 6, the Safer Municipalities Act. Extending the enforcement framework to transit special constables — agents who are not police officers, lack equivalent training, and operate under weaker oversight and accountability mechanisms — represents a significant and troubling expansion of coercive state power into essential public spaces.
“Public transit is an essential service, and should be place that is safe, accessible and inclusive to all” says Harini Sivalingam, Director of the Equality Program. ” Giving transit special constables police-equivalent powers to arrest, detain, and seize property will not make riders safer — it will make vulnerable people less safe.”
Decades of evidence document that transit enforcement disproportionately targets Black and Indigenous people, racialized communities, unhoused individuals, and people living with mental health conditions.
The CCLA is particularly concerned that these regulations are being implemented at the same time the Ontario government is defunding and closing supervised consumption sites across the province — proven, evidence-based interventions that save lives, reduce overdose deaths, decrease emergency room visits, and connect people to treatment and support.
The juxtaposition is not incidental. It is a policy choice: replacing healthcare with enforcement, closing the door of health-based responses to the toxic drug crisis, and expanding the reach of punitive state powers.
“This government is not solving a problem. It is punishing people for being poor, for being unhoused, for living with addiction — and it is doing so while dismantling the very services that could actually help them,” said Sivalingam.
The CCLA calls on the Ontario government to withdraw the designation of transit special constables as enforcement officers under this framework; reverse course on the defunding and closure of supervised consumption sites; and invest in evidence-based, health-centered responses to public substance use, including harm reduction services, mobile crisis response teams, and trained outreach workers.
If the government fails to do the right thing, CCLA will closely monitor the implementation and enforcement of these regulations.
Read CCLA’s submissions to the Solicitor General ici.
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