LILLEY: Olivia Chow's drug playbook already failed in Vancouver
· Toronto Sun
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Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim has a simple message for voters in Toronto when it comes to drug policy: Don’t follow Vancouver’s example — it won’t lead to good places.
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If you drive or walk the streets of Toronto, the zombie-like creatures now occupying our public spaces are not a shocking scene anymore. They aren’t there by accident, though. They are there due to decisions by so-called progressive politicians to liberalize drug laws.
For years, we’ve been told to follow the example of politicians in British Columbia. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow still backs the same failed policies that have turned parts of Vancouver into a wasteland and are now doing the same to Toronto.
The road from needles to no rules at all
The progressive view on drug policy, supported by people like Chow, held that the path forward ran from needle exchanges to safe injection sites to safer supply to decriminalization. Anything else we were told was a leftover from the 1980s failed “war on drugs.”
The problem is approach of ever-liberalized laws around drugs and drug possession didn’t work. Now, as Toronto deals with its own issues around public drug use, Sim is warning that his city is not the beacon to follow.
“It’s pretty hard to argue that continuing the failed policies of the past is going to give us a different outcome,” Sim said in an interview this week.
He and his administration once embraced drug decriminalization and “harm reduction” policies that included what is described as “safer supply,” but no more. The idea of “safer supply” is to replace street drugs with prescribed opioids that are considered safer.
The problem is that addicts are most likely to trade those prescribed drugs for street drugs that give a stronger high. The facilities that offer such programs attract drug dealers that prey on the vulnerable and offer them harder drugs at a price in exchange for their free government-prescribed drugs.
A mother gunned down due to a senseless policy
It was this sort of scheme that led to the shooting death of Karolina Huebner-Makurat in July 2023. The 44-year-old mother of two was out for a stroll in her neighbourhood when drug dealers at a “community health centre” which also doubled as a “safe-injection site” and “safer supply” depot was killed in a shootout by drug dealers fighting over addicts hooked on government-supplied opioids.
It’s this type of program that Sim warns against and that Chow fully supports.
“Providing safe supply was probably the biggest healthcare disaster in BC history. It did not work, and actually deaths went up,” Sim said.
In fact, British Columbia’s deaths from opioid overdose went up from 528 deaths in 2015 to a high of 2,593 in 2023 before falling to 2,318 in 2024. By comparison, Ontario had 728 opioid deaths in 2015 and rose to a high of 2,880 in 2021 before dropping to 2,263 in 2024.
It should be noted that British Columbia’s population is just about one-third of Ontario’s population.
Chow backed the push to have Toronto follow the B.C. model of complete decriminalization of drugs back in 2023 and 2024. She has never backed away from that position — she’s just tried to frame it in a better way.
“This exemption saves lives because people can more easily get support and access care, it reduces stigma, and limits the costly impacts of involving our criminal justice system. Other jurisdictions in Canada and around the world have proven it works,” Chow’s campaign said to me in 2023 when she was running for mayor in the by-election.
Chow doubles down as the body count tells a different story
Chow supported more “safe-injection” sites in 2025. She opposed Premier Doug Ford’s decision to close those sites and move towards addiction treatment. Like most so-called “progressives,” she claimed closing injection sites would lead to more deaths when the evidence shows the opposite is true.
In September 2021, there were 242 deaths in Ontario from opioid overdoses. In September 2025, that number had fallen to 127, after the sites supposedly saving lives had closed.
Chow is now running for mayor again, with the full backing of the third-party group Progress Toronto, which is calling for all candidates they back to support the decriminalization of all drugs. This is a policy that was a disaster in Vancouver, but that Chow will not back away from.
If she won’t denounce the policy — or the supporters calling for it — then we must believe that she supports it despite the horrific outcomes.
That should disqualify her from a second term as mayor of Toronto.