On Nov. 18, 2020, Jeremy Johnson crashed his Dodge Ram pickup truck on the outskirts of Fort Frances, a border town of 7,500 in Northwestern Ontario.
When police searched the accident scene, they found a jacket under the truck with a tote bag in the sleeve, wrapped around a plastic baggie. Inside was a brick of fentanyl weighing 448 grams – just five shy of a pound. As little as two milligrams of the drug, the equivalent of a few grains of salt, can be deadly for users with no tolerance for the drug.
Mr. Johnson was arrested and charged with trafficking the fentanyl, as well as 90 grams of cocaine that were also found in the jacket. He was tried and convicted, and earlier this year, finally sentenced for his crime.
Superior Court Justice John Fregeau did not mince his words when he handed him a term of 11 years and six months in a federal penitentiary.
“Mr. Johnson, you have chosen to engage in the trafficking of a large quantity of an extremely dangerous drug out of greed,” Justice Fregeau said on Feb. 3, according to an audio recording obtained by The Globe and Mail. “I need not repeat the disastrous impact that opioid addiction has had, and continues to have, on the vulnerable populations across the country – and to an even greater extent, within the Northwest region of Ontario.”
The case underlines the devastation that fentanyl is causing in the vast, thinly populated region stretching north of Lake Superior to the shores of James and Hudson bays. From Kenora to Red Lake, Dryden to Sioux Lookout, the drug has cut a cruel swath.
A table of fatal-overdose rates from the Office of the Chief Coroner (OCC) of Ontario shows northern health units holding all of the top spots in the province. Thunder Bay, a regional hub, had a rate of 78 people per 100,000 in the most recent quarter, five times the provincial average. That puts it on par with drug-stricken regions such as northern British Columbia, Washington and West Virginia.
Geographic isolation, high rates of homelessness and limited health care are worsening the crisis, said Kyle Arnold, a co-ordinator at People Advocating for Change Through Empowerment (PACE), a drop-in centre in Thunder Bay, which “is forced to fight a big-city battle with small-city tools.”
Fentanyl has been all over the news in Canada this winter. U.S. President Donald Trump claims Canada is a “massive” source for the drug and has begun imposing punishing tariffs on the country. The RCMP denies Mr. Trump’s allegation, and a Globe investigation found that the White House is using misleading figures to support its claim.
But as places such as Fort Frances and Thunder Bay show, a real fentanyl crisis is unfolding within this country.
Murals around town pay tribute to its turn-of-the-century heyday and the pulp and paper industry that helped it prosper. The local mill’s closing a decade ago was a blow to an economy that now largely centres on tourism.
The town of Fort Frances sits on the U.S. border, about halfway between Thunder Bay and Winnipeg. The Rainy River divides the town from International Falls, Minn. The Hudson’s Bay Company established a post there in the days of the fur trade and named it after the wife of its governor, Sir George Simpson. The town’s website calls it “the oldest settled community west of Lake Superior.”
Today, its location next to sprawling Rainy Lake makes it a popular hunting and fishing spot. But like many Ontario towns and cities, Fort Frances has been struggling with public-order issues. Last summer, the Ontario Provincial Police conducted a 30-day crackdown on loitering, public intoxication and trespassing in a stretch of its main street. In one recent bust, the OPP charged two men and two women after a traffic stop that they said turned up 24 grams of suspected cocaine, five grams of methamphetamine, $3,300 in cash and 13 grams of fentanyl.
About 40 people have died from opioid overdoses in the town since 2018, according to data from the OCC.
Evidence at Mr. Johnson’s trial suggested that the fentanyl found in his jacket would have generated more than $500,000 if sold in what are called “points” – quantities of a tenth of a gram.
“A point would basically kill you and I,” said Constable Aaron Green, an OPP officer who provided security inside the court during Mr. Johnson’s sentencing. Fentanyl, he said, “is ruining many lives up here.”
Traci Lockman, who until recently ran a local drop-in centre in Fort Frances, says fentanyl has claimed the lives of many people she has met – including several teenagers, some as young as 14. “I have had people at the centre who have lost three, four, five cousins and a brother,” she said. “It’s overwhelming.” Ms . Lockman says street fentanyl has become so diluted with tranquilizers that it is nullifying the effects of naloxone and other medical countermeasures used to bring people back from the brink: “It’s just taking more and more to revive people it seems.”
Elevate NWO in Thunder Bay stocks harm-reduction kits for those who seek shelter here. Tamara Kilby, who does outreach work in the encampments, says she’s found four people dead in only a year and a half on the job.
In Thunder Bay, nearly 500 people have died from opioid overdoses since 2018. You don’t have to look far to see the impact of the drug epidemic on the city.
On a frigid afternoon in late February, John Ford stood outside a homeless shelter on the south side of Thunder Bay. Mr. Ford said about 20 people he knows have died from drugs over the past two years.
He said he himself has suffered several overdoses and “it’s a scary feeling every time.” When the drugs take hold, “there’s nothing you can do about it. You overdose and you’re out.”
Today’s drugs, said Mr. Ford, 45, are powerful and unpredictable. Cocaine is mixed with fentanyl and fentanyl with sedatives: “They cut it with everything under the sun. But you don’t know that until you do it, right?”
Veteran paramedic Troy Barnard says that fatalities spike whenever a particularly toxic drug is circulating. In one such wave last year, police warned drug users to beware of taking a turquoise-coloured form of fentanyl that was laced with rat poison.
Mr. Barnard said that in another wave in November, first responders were seeing nine overdoses a day, often arriving to find the victims “VSA” – or vital signs absent. Rather than slowly going under as the drugs took hold, people were simply “dropping dead,” he said.
Paramedic Troy Barnard has seen waves of deaths in Thunder Bay as new drugs hit the market.
Deputy Police Chief Jeremy Parsons said Thunder Bay is a major hub for drugs that flow from southern Ontario and the Greater Toronto area. With the demand high and competition low, the city is a “sellers market” for opioids, pushing up prices and profit.
A pound of fentanyl would be “a tremendous amount of death and despair in one lump of substance,” he said.
Thunder Bay has tried to combat the drug epidemic through a strategy of harm reduction. The district’s Superior Points program hands out hundreds of thousands of sanitary needles a year. In 2020, the number topped a million.
But Premier Doug Ford’s government is closing Thunder Bay’s supervised consumption site, where people can go to use their drugs under supervision in case they suffer an overdose. It is one of 10 that it is shuttering around the province, arguing they are too near to schools or child-care centres. Thunder Bay’s will be replaced by a Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment, or HART, hub.
Robinson Bates, head of research at Elevate, which runs a local drop-in centre, said that “people will die” if the provincial government goes ahead and closes the site. Those who are addicted to drugs won’t stop taking them, he said, adding they will just go to back alleys and private rooms – where there is no one there to revive them if they overdose.
Robinson Bates of Elevate NWO is worried what will happen if supervised drug consumption stops in Thunder Bay.
Across Northern Ontario, the opioid crisis has hit Indigenous communities especially hard. A report last year by the health authority in Sioux Lookout, which serves 33 First Nations, found that, in 2021, visits to emergency departments for mental illness and substance use were 14 times the provincial rate. In Ontario at large, the death rate from opioids was seven times that of the general population, another report found.
Mike Metatawabin, the Deputy Grand Chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, which represents 49 First Nations in northern Ontario, lives in Timmins, where he has supported two close relatives battling opioid addiction.
At first, he said the experience was humiliating and shameful, something he and his wife kept to themselves. When tackling addictions in these communities, he said there needs to be more humanity and awareness of historical trauma Indigenous people have endured.
After living through colonialism, residential schools and other historical traumas, “we’re still a wounded people,” Mr. Metatawabin said.
At Ka-Na-Chi-Hih, a treatment centre in Thunder Bay that provides live-in programs for young Indigenous adults grappling with mental health and substance use issues, demand is outstripping capacity. Director Sean Moore said the organization has begun extending its services to Timmins and Sioux Lookout, but staffing shortages and funding shortfalls have limited the organization’s ability to meet the need.
Sean Moore is director of a treatment centre in Thunder Bay called Ka-Na-Chi-Hih, or ‘to keep one sacred’ in Ojibway.
At Mr. Johnson’s sentencing hearing, his lawyers argued that he should serve just two years less a day for his crime, meaning that he would spend his time in a provincial jail rather than a federal penitentiary. In an interview, Mr. Johnson’s lawyer, Richard Garrett, characterized him as a lifelong local resident and a father, who had fallen on hard times.
Crown prosecutors, on the other hand, said he should face up to 12 years in prison, in keeping with the upper end of a sentencing range that the Supreme Court has deemed appropriate for similar cases. They said his crime should be punished severely.
Justice Fregeau echoed the Crown’s sentiments. He said in his ruling that Mr. Johnson had a “dated but related criminal record,” including prior convictions for trafficking and possession of a controlled substance. Police suspected that Mr. Johnson had been involved in the local drug trade for years but “managed to avoid detection,” the judge told the court.
“As the investigating officer put it,” Justice Fregeau said, “You don’t wake up some random Thursday and order up a brick of fentanyl to start your drug business.”
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