When the Government of British Columbia announced in the spring that it was planning to open a supervised consumption site in downtown Vancouver, the city’s mayor, Ken Sim, issued a strongly worded statement opposing the idea and moved an urgent motion directing city staff to “use all tools available” to block it.
The province eventually backed down from its plan to relocate a closed injection site in the Yaletown neighbourhood, around which the disorder was so bad that residents filed a lawsuit , to another location, but it ignited a skirmish between those with warring visions for how to best confront the illegal fentanyl crisis.
One of the more notable protests over Sim’s decision came from Guy Felicella, who has become the poster boy for injection sites because he turned his life around years ago after frequenting one.
It’s the kind of inspirational story people love. According to his biography at the Speakers Bureau of Canada, Felicella grew up in Richmond, B.C., but “fell into addiction at a young age” and “spent 30 years in the repeated cycle of gangs, addiction, treatment and jail.” For many of those years, Felicella lived in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside, where he endured “the grips of addiction and homelessness, surviving multiple life-threatening infections, several public health crises and six overdoses.”
Felicella stopped using drugs in 2013, got married and had three children. This resurrection (which, incidentally, is the title of the forthcoming feature-length documentary about his life) has also made Felicella a popular figure on the public-speaking circuit.
Along the way, Felicella has also become the de facto spokesperson for harm reduction across Canada. When the Ontario government announced in 2024 that it was closing injection sites, Felicella wrote an op-ed opposing the decision in the Toronto Star, which leverages his extremely unique life story as a reason not to close them.
When the Montreal neighbourhood of St-Henri became vocal about the documented increase in crime and disorder after a new injection site opened there, also in 2024, Felicella flew to Montreal and posted a video from a nearby park, insisting that there was no open drug use he could see and that all was going according to plan.
When a new injection site opened in Winnipeg this summer despite intense community opposition , Felicella did a local radio interview supporting Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew’s decision to place it there.
But for Vancouver’s Ken Sim, Felicella had something different in mind. Two years earlier, the mayor had proclaimed May 29 to be “Guy Felicella Day” due to his advocacy work. Felicella, upset at Sim’s decision not to allow a new injection site in the downtown core, announced that he would be returning the plaque commemorating this honour.
“That proclamation is not worth the paper it’s printed on,” Felicella said.
This prompted a saucy post on X from Coun. Peter Meiszner, who took a swipe at Felicella over the fact that he’d chosen to raise his family in the suburbs of Surrey, far away from the anticipated chaos the site would cause.
“I recommend leaving early to avoid the insane traffic heading west on Hwy 1 in the morning,” Meiszner wrote.
Felicella took aim at Sim by countering the mayor’s claim that injection sites increase crime in the immediate area. “There’s no evidence that those sites increase crime in the area,” he said, even though there is evidence this isn’t true .
Felicella also said that, “There’s decades of research done on supervised consumption sites and how vital they are in saving lives,” an assertion that’s not nearly as settled as Felicella suggests.
Felicella’s steadfast denials that injection sites cause increases in crime and disorder are somewhat ironic given the fact that he amassed a lengthy criminal record during his years as a drug addict.
He has been open about these aspects of his criminal record but, two years ago, an Alberta judge’s 1995 sentencing decision surfaced for an ex-girlfriend of Felicella’s who’d pled guilty to stealing $18,500 from the Calgary bank where she worked as a teller, an episode that had not previously been part of his inspirational life story. The judge accepted in his decision that Felicella, then 25, had held a knife against the throat of his 20-year-old ex-girlfriend, Dawnelle Frew, in addition to other violent threats.
Felicella has adamantly denied these alleged acts of violence and repeatedly pointed out that he has never been charged or tried for them. He also wrote that “her lawyer’s strategy back in 1995 was to say I forced her to do it.”
“I hadn’t,” Felicella continued, “but I told her it was a good strategy.”
What’s most troubling for me, though, as someone who lived across the street from an injection site for more than seven years, is that Felicella is prone to selective use of facts when it comes to his advocacy in support of them.
For example, when a woman in my neighbourhood killed by drug dealers exchanging gunfire in front of the injection site I lived across the street from in Toronto became front-page news in 2023, Felicella ignored the story in his prolific posts on social media.
In March, when Felicella belatedly engaged with me on the topic of what had happened at this injection site three years earlier, he said the murder was tragic but asked: “When a stabbing, murder, or assault happens after people leave a bar, you don’t start blaming bars or calling for them to be shut down. Why is that?”
I responded , in part, that bars aren’t required to obtain federal drug-law exemptions to operate and aren’t taxpayer-funded fishing holes for drug dealers.
But, Felicella shot back, “there are more drug dealers in bars and clubs than at supervised consumption sites. They’re on speed dial.”
I replied with some basic questions: How many bars have six fentanyl dealers from 12 kilometers away on the sidewalk by the front door before noon Monday to Friday, as our site did? How many bars are in community health centres? How many bars are funded by the province?
Felicella was apparently out of answers. He never got back to me.
National Post
