Danielle Smith's former Chief of staff demanded The Calgary Herald remove an article rebutting his position...

And then it was removed.

The Architect

How does a former chief of staff seemingly get a newspaper of record to remove an article with no public announcement effectively retconning the public conversation on how to address addiction?

On September 23rd, 2025 the Calgary Herald published an opinion piece by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s former Chief of Staff, Marshall Smith entitled “Banning public drug use is bold, courageous and obvious”.

The article addressed a recent announcement by multiple Calgary city councilors running for re-election, including then Mayor Jyoti Gondek, of a pilot project giving peace officers and transit police expanded powers as well as a pilot to leverage criminal charges for public drug use to coerce drug users to choose between court or treatment.

The implication of both the title of the article and the argument presented in strongly suggest that not increasing policing is the opposite of bold and courageous. This is perhaps best exemplified in one of the opening paragraphs.

“For many Calgarians, this announcement may feel overdue. It is also a sign that the tide is finally turning toward an approach that balances compassion with accountability.”

The clear implication in this sentence is that up until this point, addressing drug use and addiction has had too much compassion and not enough accountability.

Mr Smith railed against the state of Canadian cities citing the “defining urban challenge” of our time not being cost of living, traffic or access to healthcare, stating...

“Walk through the core of any Canadian city and you will see what has become the defining urban challenge of our time: people struggling openly with addiction, using hard drugs on sidewalks, in parks, on transit platforms.”

In his article, Mr. Smith further stated

“public drug use cannot be tolerated in shared spaces.”

Intriguingly, Mr Smith failed to mention both the City of Calgary’s recent expansion of alcohol use in public parks while simultaneously arguing

“People...want leaders who will protect their right to safe parks, safe buses and safe sidewalks”

Mr Smith, who at the end of the article was publicly cited as the architect of the “Alberta Model” of recovery (which has received significant criticism for focusing only on sobriety) then went on to write...

“The obvious path forward is threefold: enforce the law against open drug use in public, ensure police and peace officers have the tools to intervene, and massively expand treatment and recovery options, which the province is doing.”

That alone may have raised many eyebrows that this was a partisan piece, but given that Mr Smith ended the article with a call to action for voters in the then upcoming municipal election, stating...

“Nationally, I’m calling on mayors across Canada to follow the lead of Calgary to put policies in place to ban open-air drug use, set strong boundaries and restore our cities to civility.”

And...

“I’m also calling on members of the recovery community and our families to pay attention to the commitments made in this municipal election and vote accordingly.”

The purpose of Mr. Smith’s article could be easily be interpreted by reasonable people to be to advance his view on treating addiction with enhanced law enforcement and to encourage voters in the then upcoming municipal election to vote for candidates who seemingly align with his view on how to address the problem of public drug use and addiction.

Which, to be clear, in an opinion piece, there is absolutely nothing wrong with.

Opinion sections on media sites are supposed to exist as public debate forums with columns written by people who have some degree of expertise on the subject they are opinioning about and who offer contrasting and sometimes competing views on the subject. This is the essence of democratic dialogue on important topics of public interest..

The Rebuttal

On October 1, 2025, The Calgary Herald published a follow up piece of sorts, which took the form of another opinion piece written by a high profile recovery advocate and public speaker from Vancouver, Guy Felicella.

From his website...

“He spent nearly twenty years residing in a two-block radius in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside. Miraculously, with sheer determination and the help of others through harm reduction and recovery, Guy managed to survive the HIV/AIDS crisis in the DTES, two decades of being homeless, multiple life-threatening bone infections, and six drug overdoses.”

Guy also has significant experience with policy advice and development, has worked with multiple governments and is often cited as a harm reduction specialist.

And in 2024, the mayor of Vancouver declared May 29th, 2024 “Guy Felicella Day”.

Which is all to say that Mr Felicella is very well situated to write a response to the position set out in Mr Smith’s piece. Which he did.

Of note, Mr Felicella mentioned Smith only 3 times in his entire piece. The first was in the introduction...

“I almost spit out my coffee when I read the headline and premise of last week’s opinion column by Marshall Smith, the former chief of staff to the premier of Alberta: “Banning public drug use is bold, courageous and obvious.”

In his column, Mr Felicella opened with his perspective that the stigma that many drug users and those grappling with addiction have directed towards them with dismissive language makes it harder for people to extricate themselves from drug use and addiction.

He cited multiple examples of politicians and pundits using hyperbolic language and in effect argued that the use of that sort of rhetoric creates unnecessary barriers to entry for people who need more resources.

Mr Felicella stated that...

“it does not take courage to suggest banning public drug use; it’s a popular hot take among pundits. The silliest part about these “bold, courageous” calls for drug prohibition? Public drug use is already banned everywhere in Canada”

This brings us to the second mention of Mr Smith in Mr Felicella’s column.

“So while Smith’s simplistic solution might seem obvious, it’s not. Like others who seek to politicize this crisis, he leaves out the critical defining detail: the contaminated and unpredictable illicit drug supply.”

The reality of the toxic drug supply is well documented and something that even Mr Smith’s previous employer, the Premier of Alberta Danielle Smith has acknowledged as being a significant driving factor to deaths in drug users. What this paragraph represents though is the ideological divide that appears to exist between the views offered to the public by Mr Smith and Mr Felicella.

Mr Smith is on the public record as being adamantly against harm reduction measures such as safer supply and supervised consumption sites.

From a May 24, 2025 profile on Mr Smith published in the Globe and Mail...

“The conventional wisdom, repeated over and over by advocates and health authorities, holds that the crisis is the result of a “poisoned drug supply.” Potent synthetic opioids such as fentanyl have taken over from heroin and cocaine as the dominant street drugs, permeating the drug market.

The solution is not to force people to stop using them or to put pressure on them to get treatment for their addiction. The solution is to make it less dangerous for them to use their drugs: the approach known as harm reduction. That means giving drug users supervised places in which to consume them, clean needles with which to inject them and even free, pharmacy-dispensed “safe supply” drugs to take.

Mr. Smith rejects that approach.”

Mr Felicella is on multiple places in the public record as advocating for an “all hands on deck approach” calling for the use of all evidence based options to keep drug users alive, build relationships that allow them to access treatment when they are ready (which the data overwhelmingly shows is when the highest rates of recovery and sobriety are achieved) and ensure that they have the supports needed after treatment to maintain their recovery.

The third mention of Mr Smith occur near the end of the article...

“As Smith points out, addiction is a health issue, yet he wants to criminalize it further. Two parts of his threefold plan — punishing drug users, and ensuring police and peace officers have more tools to punish them with — will only drive people back into secrecy.”

Any reader of both articles is free to draw their own interpretation of whose philosophy towards addressing drug use and addiction aligns with their own. Additionally any reasonable reader should be able to recognize that while these two columns were written from two radically different philosophies, no personal attacks occurred.

Which, as noted above, is the purpose of an opinion section, a place for the free debate of ideas.

But for anyone who believes that the foundation of any democracy is a well-informed electorate, and that most often the electorate are informed by a free press, what happened next should be very concerning.

A Free Canadian Press?

On October 6th, 2025, Guy Felicella received a letter from the law firm of Prowse Barret LLP.

That letter, is reprinted here with Mr Felicella’s permission...

The letter accuses Mr Felicella of making defamatory statements against Mr Smith and that if Mr Felicella did not have his article removed as well as publish an apology, further legal action would be launched.

Mr Felicella says that after receiving this letter he then contacted the Calgary Herald who advised that his column had been reviewed prior to publication by their legal representation, it was not found in any way to be defamatory and that the local editors in Calgary had absolutely no intention of removing the article.

However, over the course of the Thanksgiving long weekend, the article was nonetheless quietly deleted from the Herald’s website without any written explanation or public notice.

Mr Felicella tells The Breakdown that he did not request the article be removed, he did not intend for the article be removed and he was not notified the article was being removed.

An anonymous source with the Herald stated that the decision to remove the article was a surprise to local staff and counter to the direction and decision of the local editorial control.

The Breakdown has provided both articles and the legal threat letter to multiple journalists and lawyers who have unanimously stated that the column by Mr Felicella wrote did not come anywhere close to reaching the standard for defamation or removal from publication.

It is widely known that these sort of cease and desist letters which make unsubstantiated claims of defamation are the beginning of a strategy known as SLAPPs – strategic lawsuits against public participation. The goal of a SLAPP is not necessarily to win the case, but rather use the fear of legal proceedings to bully political opponents into silence. We here at the Breakdown know a thing or two about these SLAPPs.

The Breakdown requested official comment from both Prowse Barret LLP and the Calgary Herald and did not receive any response.

What are the implications?

In 2017, The Washington Post adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness”.

That phrase was popularized by legendary journalist Bob Woodward and was informed in no small part by the belief that journalism plays a critical role in exposing the tactics of those attempting to subvert democracy and pursue individual power.

Confidence in media continues to erode with less than half of Canadians stating they have trust in “legacy” media according to stat can.

As available, the facts of this situation are simple...

- Two opinion columns were published, both having differing views and both critical of the opposing view.

- Mr Smith responded to Mr Felicella’s column with clear legal threats.

- The position of the newspaper (as per our anonymous source) was that the article written by Mr Felicella had been legally vetted and the local Herald leadership was committed to the position that the article would not be removed.

- A few days after Mr. Felicella receives a cease and desist letter from Mr Smith and a demand that Fellicella’s piece be removed from the Herald website, the article was removed without notice or announcement.

- The removal was not by Mr Felicella’s request or with his knowledge.

It remains unknown why Mr. Felicella’s piece was removed by the Herald, but the timing of that following Mr. Marshall’s demand letter and legal threats suggests to a reasonable observer that Mr. Smith may have influenced the Herald to remove Mr. Fellicella’s piece.If this is indeed what happened, there are certainly those that would argue that a powerful political figure being able to quietly and retroactively re-write the political conversation is cause for both concern and scrutiny, especially when it comes to an issue both as sensitive and complex as addressing addiction.

It is particularly alarming to contemplate the damage to the Herald’s journalistic credibility, and by extension the journalists affiliated with it when according to at least one anonymous source, this decision was made completely out of their control.

Finally, the fact that this article appears to have been removed under all of these circumstances unfortunately creates the basis for an argument where the independence and integrity of the Calgary Herald and indeed any Postmedia outlet can be questioned by those who want to see their media make their decisions not on the whim of politicians or because of intimidation, but on what ensures that the electorate is best informed so that democracy indeed does not die in darkness.

We have reprinted the original article by Mr Felicella with his permission on our Substack.

Marshall Smith’s article remains up on the Calgary Herald website.