Derek Finkle: The injection site activist who just won’t quit

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“That proclamation is not worth the paper it’s printed on,” Felicella said.

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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.