Emergency-room visits for opioid overdoses increased 76 per cent in a year, according to new figures the Ontario government released Tuesday.

The figures compare the first half of 2016 to the first half of 2017. The number of trips to hospital for overdoses from drugs like heroin, morphine and fentanyl increased from 1,078 to 1,898, the government says.

Our numbers are a bit less alarming than the provincewide trend but still headed the wrong way. In the first half of 2016, local hospitals saw 109 opioid-overdose cases. In the first half of 2017, they saw 157.

Over a year ago, with the crisis brewing and knowing worse was to come, Ottawa’s board of health voted 9-2 in favour of the general idea of helping someone else open a supervised drug-injection site, a place where addicts shooting drugs like heroin can be treated by nurses if they accidentally overdose.

The Sandy Hill Community Health Centre is due to open a fuller site around the end of October, working as quickly as it can to get all the approvals and money it needs, but in the meantime the body count is growing.

So far, the only such site in Ottawa is a tent in Lowertown, staffed part-time by volunteers, whose rough disregard for bureaucratic niceties changed the discussion from “Can we do this?” to “We’re doing this — are you going to stop us?”

The Ottawa Public Health board supported two motions Monday night in support of supervised injection services in Lowertown and Centretown.

The first motion — to create an interim supervised injection site at the public health clinic at 179 Clarence St. — was a last-minute addition to the agenda supported by the city's chief medical officer of health, Dr. Isra Levy.

The second — a motion from Coun. Catherine McKenney introduced during the meeting — called for Ottawa Public Health (OPH) to advocate on behalf of the Somerset West Community Health Centre's application for a permanent supervised injection site.

Ottawa Public Health is working with the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre to allow the city's Clarence Street clinic to operate as an interim site using the exemption Sandy Hill received from Health Canada.

Levy said the work of volunteers at Overdose Prevention Ottawa impressed upon him the need for a supervised injection service.

"The kinds of numbers that they were reporting they were seeing — really, several people every night in just three hours — did confirm what we suspected," Levy said. "Services like that would really have an impact and could be expected to make a difference."

Volunteers from Overdose Prevention Ottawa, which operates an unsanctioned site in Raphael Brunet Park, said they had 765 visits in 24 days. The site is open three hours a day.

Community health centres across the city are going ahead with a pilot project that will stock vending machines with free access to sterile needles and crack pipes.

It's part of a harm-reduction strategy in partnership with Ottawa Public Health to stem the rise of drug-related infections.

The new machines are located at OPH's needle exchange program on Clarence Street and the Sandy Hill, Somerset West, and Carlington community health centres.

Drug users are first given a token through the needle exchange or safe inhalation programs run by OPH. Using the token, the user can access one of two kits from the vending machines.

The first one is a safe injection kit, which contains three clean syringes, a strip of cookers, alcohol swabs, and a tie.

The second kit is a safe inhalation kit, which contains stems for smoking crack, a screen, a push stick, and a mouth piece to limit the spread of disease.

"My philosophy is that everybody matters and everybody should have access to health and safety and be able to access safe supplies," said Naini Cloutier, executive director of Somerset West Community Health Centre.

Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor had no updates Thursday on two proposed supervised injection site in Ottawa.

The city is pushing to open an interim site to deal with rising numbers of opioid overdoses. Mayor Jim Watson has expressed also hope the proposed site could lead to the closure of an unsanctioned pop-up site in a Lowertown Park.

Petitpas Taylor toured the Shepherds of Good Hope facility in Lowerton on Thursday as new numbers came out showing the crisis is getting worse in Canada.

The facility operates treatment and addiction program and has also applied to operate a supervised injection site. Petitpas Taylor could only say that application is under review.

“We received an application and our department officials are certainly working through the process,” she said.

Catherine Hacksel, a worker at the facility and a volunteer with the pop-up injection site questioned the minister on why the process was taking so long.

“Folks here are responding to overdoses in bathrooms and dorms and having to check basically because clients can’t disclose when they’re using,” she said. “I am just wondering exactly what you’re waiting for?”

Overdose Prevention Ottawa, the organizers behind the pop-up supervised injection site in Lowertown have accused Mayor Jim Watson of behaving “recklessly with his own residents’ lives.”

The group issued a statement on Wednesday that celebrated the successes they have had over twenty days of operation. That statement also took the mayor to task for what they are calling a dangerous level of inaction.

“Mayor Jim Watson continues to spread misinformation and ignore expert knowledge on the matter,” wrote the group. “Out of the 25 overdose prevention sites in Canada, no other civic leader, entrusted with the safety and duty of care for citizens, has behaved as recklessly with his own residents’ lives as Mayor Watson.”

A unique program in downtown Ottawa is bringing safe injection paraphernalia directly to the drug users living on the streets, help that's hand-delivered by their friends and peers.

Ottawa Inner City Health, a non-profit organization aimed at improving access to health care for the chronically homeless, set up the peer overdose prevention team in May when drug overdoses started to spike in the downtown core.

"We use our peer workers to patrol the hotspot areas around downtown to check for people who are overdosing, and to hand out equipment that people might need," said Anne Marie Hopkins of Ottawa Inner City Health.

That equipment includes naloxone kits, pipes, water and clean needles — the essential tools of the harm reduction trade.

What's unique about this program is the people who are being paid to hand out the gear  — recovering addicts and people who used to live on the streets.

With opioid overdoses rising, Ottawa Public Health is scrambling to open its own supervised injection site in the ByWard Market, just weeks after a pop-up tent opened nearby in Lowertown.

Health officer Dr. Isra Levy said Tuesday that the opioid crisis has created an urgent need in the city to expand existing harm reduction services, including supervised injection sites.

“It is my intent to begin to offer these services as soon as we can responsibly do so, and we are aiming to achieve that within the next two weeks,” Levy told the board of health in a memo. Levy said he believes he has the authority to do it without direct approval from the board, but he’ll ask for a vote on his plan at the next health-board meeting on Monday.

The site would be in a health-unit building at 179 Clarence St. in the ByWard Market, but would be operated by the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre. That clinic, at Rideau and Nelson streets, is planning to open a permanent supervised injection site and has federal approval for it, but it won’t be ready to go until the end of October. And, Levy wrote, drug users are in danger now.

“To date in 2017, we are seeing an average of nearly 120 emergency room visits for suspected opioid overdose each month in Ottawa, compared with fewer than 100 per month in 2016,” his memo said.

 City officials will hold a meeting today to discuss the pop-up supervised injection site in a Lowertown Park.

Councillor Mathieu Fleury says officials have held several meetings, adding he is “confident” a solution is imminent.

Overdose Prevention Ottawa opened a supervised injection site in a tent at Raphael Brunet Park on St. Patrick Street just over two weeks ago.

Organizer Marilou Gagnon tweeted Monday morning "TO opened an interim supervised injection site days after the overdose prevention site opened. It's day 18 in Ottawa and still nothing."  Overdose Prevention Ottawa is calling on the city to open an interim supervised injection site in Ottawa.

Organizers say a record 66 people used the site on Sunday, and two overdoses were prevented.  Since the pop-up supervised injection site opened, more than 500 people have used the site to inject drugs.

What’s a few lives lost in service of protecting bureaucracy? Surely, a little moral grandstanding is worth more than the health and safety of some of our most vulnerable neighbours.

This is, basically, what we’re being told by those opposing a pop-up Supervised Injection Site at Raphael Brunet Park.

Facing an opioid crisis that saw 135 overdoses in June alone, Overdose Prevention Ottawa launched the pop-up site … because someone needed to do something.

Both the city and the province have been slow to act on this issue. People in Ottawa have been pushing for a Secure Injection Site for years. We have approval for one in Sandy Hill, but we have to wait for the bureaucracy to catch up to the crisis.

It doesn’t matter, apparently, that people will die. The bureaucracy must be allowed to churn along at its own glacial pace.

It’s ridiculous. We know that Supervised Injection Sites work. Insite has been running for almost 15 years, improving health outcomes and reducing overdoses in Vancouver.

It was just over three years ago that Simon Fraser University came out with a study demonstrating that an SIS would be a net financial benefit to the city, in addition to the beneficial health impact. A 2013 study out of the University of Pittsburgh demonstrated that SISs had either no effect on the crime rate or actually reduced it.

This is a public policy unicorn — it saves lives, can reduce crime and benefits us fiscally.

And yet still, we wait.