It is impossible not to know there is an overdose crisis in Canada. You might think that no one is more aware of it than nurses, paramedics and social service workers – tens of thousands of whom are CUPE members.

But what fewer people realize is how deeply social and medical crises in Canada affect public libraries. With fewer public spaces that are truly open to the public, our libraries are becoming the only refuge left for many of our most vulnerable neighbours.

“I see libraries as a public good where we have a duty to provide services to those who are often abandoned by the state or kicked out of other public spaces,” says Kendra Cowley.

Cowley was a librarian at the Toronto Public Library in December 2024 when Ontario Premier Doug Ford brought in legislation forcing the closure of most supervised consumption sites in the province. These sites are closing despite an injunction, as the province withdrew funding for the services.

It was a move that put thousands of lives at risk, and pushed more drug use into dangerous, unsupervised spaces like libraries.

Cowley, who recently resigned from Toronto Public Library to take a job at a university library in Wyoming, sat on a library committee focused on providing services to vulnerable people when the provincial bill was announced. When the bill was raised in the committee, management said the issue was outside the committee’s mandate. Cowley and others disagreed and, together with library safety specialists who deal with drug poisonings daily, drafted an open letter.

That letter quickly gathered hundreds of signatures and sparked a new grassroots movement: Ontario Library Workers for Supervised Consumption Sites (OLW4SCS).

The group – mainly library workers from large urban systems such as Toronto, Hamilton and London – launched a survey and a public advocacy campaign in support of the consumption sites that keep people they care about safe and help keep their workplaces safer.

The survey of 133 library workers in 16 cities found that more than 38% had responded to an overdose in the workplace, yet only half were trained well enough to feel confident in using naloxone – a medication that can reverse an overdose from opioids – and one-third did not know where to find it in their library branch.

Together, OLW4SCS played a significant advocacy role: providing important context for news stories, presenting to the CUPE Ontario Library Workers Caucus, and – at the Ontario Library Association’s invitation – staffing a booth at the OLA Super Conference. They also created a zine and resource site to help library workers have conversations in their workplaces and communities, something many had been craving.

“I saw what they posted on Instagram about starting this group and was really excited. I don’t have a lot of opportunities to share space and talk with people about this. We have so many shared experiences all across the province,” says Zoë Hayes, an information clerk at Hamilton Public Library and member of CUPE 932. “It feels like a success to have this network that allows us to share experiences and similarities because it can be so isolating. The survey we did was really helpful for that – to be able to say it’s not just happening here and there, but we’re all experiencing it in different places.”

Before becoming a library worker, Hayes was a counsellor and did harm reduction placements, including at South Riverdale Community Health Centre (SRCHC) in the east end of Toronto. SRCHC has a team of peer support workers who established the concept of street nursing. It also operated a supervised consumption site that CUPE Ontario campaigned to open. Later, in 2018, SRCHC staff organized into CUPE 5399.

Talking about compassionate treatment isn’t always easy for library workers. In recent years, as governments of all levels failed again and again to address the overlapping addiction, mental health and housing crises, library staff are left to contend with rising numbers of drug poisonings, disruptive patrons, and violent incidents.

While these problems are not new for libraries in major urban centres, they have become increasingly common in smaller cities, particularly in regional hubs like Peterborough, Kingston and Thunder Bay.

At the Thunder Bay library branch where a CUPE member was violently assaulted on the job in May, incidents rose by 183% over the past winter.

Most people living with addictions are neither violent nor disruptive – the spike in incidents reflects the multiple, overlapping social crises at play.

Unfortunately, the response of many libraries has been to hire security guards, or do nothing at all, to address the health and safety issues.

“One of the core conversations we needed to have as a group was, if we frame this as a health and safety issue, which it is, whose health are we talking about and whose safety are we talking about? To necessarily lump together a medical incident with violence doesn’t solve the problem,” says Cowley. “If we’re talking about safety, we need to prioritize the safety of the person who is in imminent threat of brain damage or death.”

Some library systems have been taking more innovative approaches. There are social workers in downtown branches of some urban library systems, for example.

Toronto Public Library has a pilot team of library safety specialists trained in de-escalation and drug poisoning response. But there are only 12 of them across the system’s 100 branches.

Hamilton Public Library partners with CAMH to provide peer support workers in its downtown branch. Peer support workers typically have a common background to the people they are supporting and are known in the community, so there is a level of trust others may lack, as one support worker explained at the CUPE Ontario Library Workers Caucus in April.

But again, it is a pilot project in one branch, not a system-wide strategy. Peer support workers don’t exist at the Barton branch where Hayes works – a part of Hamilton that has a large unhoused population.

“I’m so grateful for that peer support worker pilot at the central branch and for the social workers. I hope we can get them here too,” Hayes says.

Even that won’t fix everything. Solving the crises will require a concerted effort by all levels of government to increase affordable and supportive housing, expand mental health supports, and adopt real solutions to the overdose epidemic that killed more than 50,000 Canadians between 2016 and 2024, according to Health Canada.

“I’ve seen things escalate so much over time,” Hayes adds. “This winter was definitely the hardest and that was before the supervised consumption sites closed. I’m anticipating fallout. Winter is when we see the most health crises and challenges in the branch.” CUPE Ontario – an early, outspoken advocate for safe consumption sites and their workers – continues to campaign against the closures.

In June, OLW4SCS made deputations to the library boards in Hamilton and Toronto. They urged the boards to outline their plans for addressing Bill 233 and the drug-toxicity crisis, to ask front-line staff what they actually need – not more training, but time to recover from attending an incident – and to defend the right to public services that keep people safe.

At the end of the day, library workers are deeply compassionate, but few choose the profession expecting to handle overdoses or mental health crises.

What stands out is their remarkable desire for compassionate approaches, their appetite for new ideas but also their incredible need for more help.

Adequate staffing levels are at the core of both addressing health and safety concerns and attending to medical emergencies appropriately. Yet, right now, library workers are often working alone or in understaffed environments, expected to be at the desk, assist patrons, and run programs simultaneously.

“We can’t train ourselves out of a crisis,” Cowley says. “If I have to do all these other things, I can’t give my full attention to someone in medical distress.”

Connect with OLW4SCS at instagram.com/libraryworkers4scs