My Son Joey: A Victim Of MP Michelle Ferreri Too
By Kelly Whetung, who voted for this MP in 2021, is a lifelong resident of Peterborough, a First Nations mom of 2 boys & a passionate advocate of harm reduction & mental health supports.
Note: This Substack welcomes guest writers who are interested in telling a long-form story about the impact of having Michelle Ferreri as our MP. What Really Happened™ in essay form. Here is our first submission from Kelly Whetung, one of Michelle Ferreri’s Constituents:
In case you need a face to connect with on August 30, International Overdose Awareness Day, I’d like to introduce you to my son. Sadly, his story is one of too many.
My boy Joey was a sweet young man who was drowning in the darkness of addiction. He died on December 21, 2017 as a result of a toxic drug poisoning. He had a family who loved him dearly and struggled alongside him, as so many people like Joey do.
Addiction can happen to anyone. Substance abuse disorders affect all walks of life. It doesn’t just impact the addict; families suffer their own despair from the stigma associated with active addiction and drug-related deaths. There is no real way to describe it, to truly comprehend it, except to say: if you know, you know, and I’m so sorry.
In order to raise awareness of the dangers of the toxic drug supply and with hopes of sparing other families the pain we have endured, I did an interview in 2018 with local v-logger Michelle Ferreri, seven weeks after my son died. At that time, Ferreri was interviewing and hosting an array of guests, trying to build a media following and her interviews touched on many different topics. As an active follower of hers on social media, I thought this would be a good place to share Joey’s story, and it was. Many reached out to me after that interview. I continued to follow Ferreri on social media, and was excited she was running for MP in my community. I felt from the brief personal connection I had with her, and from following her on social media, she would be one to make a difference for the Joey’s in the world.
It was through Ferreri’s social media that I became aware of Guy Felicella, a harm reduction advocate who’s now 11 years in recovery from drug addiction. As a new MP, Ferreri invited Guy to speak on her social media platforms on numerous occasions about harm reduction and his own personal, decades-long struggles with addictions and homelessness. On the day that this essay is published online, I also send out a congratulations to Guy Felicella for being awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal in recognition of this work, an honour he truly deserves and has more than earned just by being alive on this day, which happens to be his birthday!
In 2022, Ferreri, who was then Shadow Minister for Tourism, traveled to Vancouver for a meeting. While there, she met up with Guy and he provided her a tour of Insite, North America’s first supervised drug consumption site. Ferreri had campaigned hard on a promise to bring a much-needed Mental Health and Addiction Treatment Centre to Peterborough. She also visited Foundry, a Centre offering mental health and addiction services for youth aged 12 to 24. In The Peterborough Examiner article that covered this trip, which you can read here, Ferreri said “this model should be replicated 1000% across Canada” and “she’ll continue to work with him [Guy] from afar on further ideas to help Peterborough.”
How things have drastically changed in two short years! I am happy to see that Guy Felicella is now a prominent, well-recognized speaker about harm reduction. Our Riding’s own Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Piggott, shared Guy’s recent contribution featured in the Toronto Star. Please read the August 25 article, “I almost died of an overdose. Then I got married and had three kids. Ask my family if closing supervised consumption sites is a good idea.”
Now back to Michelle. She has decided that Guy’s valuable input is now harmful. Instead of sharing his information, someone who is working closely with medical experts and advocates, as well as through the lens of his own lived experiences, Ferreri has done a complete about-face and touts a disgraced Op-Ed writer as her so-called expert. Adam Zivo, a frequent contributor to the National Post, is often discredited and called out for sharing misinformation. “After a complaint was submitted to the National NewsMedia Council (NNMC), the National Post has settled on issuing a public clarification regarding one of Adam Zivo’s deceptive and hyperbolic drug law opinion editorials.” You can read a summary here.
Why the change in Ferreri? Because Zivo’s words fit the Conservative’s message and the man with real knowledge doesn’t. Ferreri makes a lot of money now, the most she could ever imagine, and she aspires to keep that as well as land a Cabinet position should Conservatives prevail in the next election. Ferreri made it clear in a January 1st declaration to the Peterborough Examiner that her top priority for 2024 “is to ensure Pierre Poilievre is elected Prime Minister of Canada.”
Poilievre is at war with safe supply programs and has said Conservatives support scrapping safer-supply programs, while diverting resources into treatment. Such a simplistic philosophy to a very complex problem. I can assure you, forced treatment often doesn’t work. And often deaths are not the result of an overdose, it is the result of unregulated drug toxicity, something safe consumption sites, like the one in Peterborough, will test for, with no judgement or questions asked. Harm reduction like this, and safe supply could have kept my son alive until he chose recovery, like Guy did.
MP Ferreri is not out for anyone’s best interests but Poilievre’s and her own, regardless of the damage to her community. The person who once conveyed compassion now speaks of people like my boy as disruptive, an inconvenience, “in the way of shoppers”, and “zombies” on the street. She often completely dehumanizes people struggling with the medical affliction of addiction, like my son.
While Ferreri sees a zombie on the street, I see my son’s face. I see someone struggling and masking pains and internal battles that we could never comprehend.
You will often see me, along with many others, calling Ferreri out on her social media posts. I get angry, especially when I see our Medical Officer of Health Dr. Piggott having to counteract her disinformation on harm reduction and safe supply. When it comes to such serious issues that are often life and death, we need facts, not fiction. We need someone that will put “People before Party”, a play on the title of Ferreri’s short-lived and failed-again video interview series.
I don’t even recognize the person I voted for and regret casting that vote. Compassion and thoughtful leadership grounded in truth and facts has been tossed aside for anger, fear, lies and conspiracy theories. My hope that this MP would make a positive impact in our community has now changed to fear. Her actions, in video and words blasted to 120,000 followers and often picked up by media because they’re designed to be inflammatory, are harming our community and in particular, the organizations that support our community. I fear for other Joey’s and Moms like me, should Poilievre and Ferreri’s Conservatives win the next election.
Voting matters. Ferreri won’t get my vote. Now I ask you, do you lower the rope to someone struggling, or ask if they are addicted to drugs first?
