Lambton does not need more proof of effort. It needs outcomes.

Lambton has plans, programs, funding, police enforcement, outreach, shelters and a new HART Hub, but overdose calls are rising sharply again. In this opinion piece, Greg argues the community should stop measuring effort as success and judge every major response by outcomes. Fewer deaths, fewer overdoses, fewer repeat crises, and more people safely housed and connected to care.

Lambton does not have an overdose-response problem because no one is doing anything. It has a harder problem, almost everyone is doing something, and the crisis is still getting worse.

Paramedics, public health, police, shelters, food banks, outreach teams, the county, the city and the province are all active in different parts of the crisis. Strategies exist. Committees meet. Programs launch. Reports are written. Funding is announced. Charges are laid. Beds are opened. Food is distributed. Calls are answered.

There is no shortage of activity. Yet after a one-year decline, Lambton’s overdose calls are rising sharply again.

That should be the centre of the discussion. Lambton is busy. It is planning, spending, arresting, feeding, sheltering, treating and responding. Some of that work is necessary. Some of it is valuable. Some of it is likely saving lives. But the results are not matching the scale of the crisis.

This is not a crisis of no response. It is a crisis of insufficient results.

The responsibility is split across almost every level of government and almost every local system. Lambton County is responsible for EMS, social services, housing and homelessness planning. Lambton Public Health tracks opioid harms and supports prevention, harm reduction and public-health reporting. Sarnia controls local land-use decisions, bylaw response, municipal pressure points and the police budget. Sarnia police handle enforcement and public-order calls. The Police Services Board oversees policing. Bluewater Health, CMHA Lambton Kent and community partners operate pieces of the mental-health and addiction system. Ontario controls much of the health-care, housing, mental-health, addiction and HART Hub framework. Ottawa controls criminal law and national drug policy.

Everyone owns a piece, which is exactly why the result is so easy to avoid. When a crisis is this fragmented, every institution can point to its own work. EMS can point to calls answered. Public health can point to surveillance. Police can point to arrests and seizures. Housing officials can point to plans. The province can point to funding. Social agencies can point to clients served.

All of that can be true while the crisis continues to deepen.

Community Safety and Well-Being planning is not optional window dressing in Ontario. Municipalities are required to prepare and adopt these plans, which are meant to identify local risk factors and reduce them before they become repeated crisis calls. Lambton’s plan names housing and homelessness, mental health and addictions, poverty and systemic racism as connected priorities.

The overdose crisis is not outside that framework. It is one of the clearest tests of whether the framework means anything.

Lambton’s major planning documents already understand the shape of the problem. The Drug and Alcohol Strategy connects substance use to socioeconomic status, housing availability, mental-health care, harm reduction, treatment, enforcement, regulated substance supply, colonization and discrimination. The Community Safety and Well-Being Plan connects community safety to housing, homelessness, mental health, addictions, poverty and systemic racism.

A plan is not an outcome. Neither is a committee, a pilot project, a funding announcement, a police seizure, a shelter bed, a dashboard or a strategy document. Those things may be necessary. Some may save lives. But none of them is the final measure of success.

The outcome is fewer people dying, fewer people overdosing, fewer people sleeping outside, and fewer people returning from an overdose to the same hunger, trauma, poverty, unsafe housing and toxic supply that put them at risk in the first place.

The outcome is fewer people cycling between EMS, emergency rooms, police, shelters, court, withdrawal, relapse and another 911 call.

By that standard, Lambton is nowhere near where it needs to be.

The HART Hub is the clearest example of how easily activity can be mistaken for achievement. The Sarnia-Lambton hub has been described as a major provincial investment, funded at $6.3 million per year for three years, with 30 private bedrooms and a promise to connect people to housing, primary care, addiction treatment and recovery supports.

That is substantial. It should not be dismissed. But the existence of the HART Hub is not the achievement. The achievement would be fewer overdose calls, fewer people sleeping outside, fewer repeat crises, less hospital pressure and more people reaching genuine stability. If the hub helps produce those outcomes, it deserves credit. If it does not, the community should not be satisfied with the announcement alone.

The same pattern appears across the system. Sarnia police can count charges, arrests, warrants and seizures. Housing officials can count planned units. Food banks can count visits. HART can count beds. Outreach teams can count engagements. Those numbers matter, but they are not the final measure.

The final measure is whether fewer people reach the point of overdose, homelessness, hunger or crisis.

Sarnia police reported 168 drug-related Controlled Drugs and Substances Act charges in 2024, up 62 per cent from the previous year. That may matter in cases involving violence, coercion or organized trafficking. But if drug charges rise and overdose calls surge again, enforcement cannot be treated as proof that the crisis is improving. It is not a substitute for fewer deaths, safer supply, stable housing, treatment access or fewer repeat emergencies.

Lambton County’s recent housing planning work says nearly 1,100 affordable and specialized supportive housing units or spaces are needed over the next decade, including hundreds of rent-geared-to-income units. Sarnia’s Housing Needs Assessment says social-assistance shelter allowances are less than half of average market rents and that one-bedroom rents have climbed sharply over the last decade. Addiction services are trying to stabilize people inside a housing market that is still destabilizing them.

Food insecurity belongs in the same conversation. When more than a quarter of Lambton households are food insecure, when food banks are serving thousands of people, and when poverty is rising alongside overdose calls, the crisis cannot be treated as a narrow drug problem. Food insecurity, homelessness, poverty and addiction are not separate emergencies that happen to overlap by accident. They are part of the same social failure.

This is where governments and institutions often hide behind motion. They announce, coordinate, pilot, consult, enforce, fund and measure what they did. But people do not live inside institutional activity reports. They live, or die, inside outcomes.

A person who overdoses does not need proof that five agencies have mandates touching their life. They need a system that keeps them alive before the overdose happens. A person leaving hospital does not need a strategy document. They need somewhere safe to go. A person using alone does not need another public statement about enforcement. They need the conditions that make survival more likely and death less likely.

Lambton has spent years building pieces of a response. The pieces are not enough.

If Lambton is serious about this crisis, every major response should be judged by outcomes the public can understand: fewer overdose calls, fewer deaths, fewer repeat emergencies, fewer people sleeping outside, more people housed, and more people connected to care. Anything less allows institutions to keep proving they are busy while the crisis keeps proving they are not succeeding.

The overdose crisis is not asking whether Lambton is busy. It is asking whether Lambton is saving lives.