Separatists deliver their petition signatures, try to create an impression of unstoppable momentum

That massive data breach, though, leaves separatists and sympathizers in Alberta’s UCP government with a big perception problem

Flag-waving supporters of the Stay Free Alberta petition gathered at Elections Alberta’s headquarters in Edmonton yesterday (Photo: Twitter/X).

Separatists Mitch Sylvestre and Jeff Rath showed up at Elections Alberta headquarters in Edmonton yesterday afternoon with a big crowd of flag-waving supporters and a trailer full of boxes of petition forms calling for a referendum on Alberta separating from Canada.

They said their “Stay Free Alberta” petition has gathered 301,620 signatures, more than the 178,000 required by its deadline on Saturday.

Mr. Sylvestre – CEO of the Alberta Prosperity Project, proponent of the APP’s Stay Free Alberta campaign, and operator of a Bonnyville gun store – naturally tried to paint the achievement as evidence of unstoppable momentum. “We look forward to your government receiving this clear expression of the democratic will of Albertans and advancing the next steps,” he read from a letter to Premier Danielle Smith.

Mr. Rath, a lawyer who acts as the group’s principal spokesperson, told the CBC the stay on Elections Alberta verifying the signatures granted on April 9 by a Court of King’s Bench judge in response to a lawsuit from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Blackfoot Confederacy is “meaningless” because the premier can’t ignore so many Albertans.

Except that she can, of course – at least if the signatures are those of the 456,365 Albertans who signed former Progressive Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian petition last year in a shorter time period despite a higher bar to success. Of those, more than 400,000 were verified by Elections Alberta, easily exceeding the nearly 300,000 required at the time.

Of course, that was before Premier Smith and her government temporarily changed the rules to make it easier for the separatists before changing them back again to make any more “citizens’ initiatives” harder and more expensive for anyone else.

And, yes, Mr. Lukaszuk chose a “legislative proposal” under the law in an effort to force his pro-Canada question to a vote in the Legislature. In hindsight, especially given the UCP’s willingness to keep changing the rules to benefit its separatist allies, this was a mistake. There can be no doubt many signers thought they were asking for that question to be on a ballot.

So if we’re just going to go by feelings now, as Mr. Rath argues we should, the numbers suggest that Forever Canada is the petition the premier mustn’t ignore.

Well, there’s not much chance of Ms. Smith doing the right thing. And in Messrs. Sylvestre’s and Rath’s boots, who wouldn’t try to make the referendum they want sound inevitable?

There are a couple of numbers in addition to the Albertans who signed the Forever Canadian petition to consider as well.

There are the one million signatures supporters of the Stay Free Alberta petition so confidently predicted in the opening days of the separatist campaign. Surely 300,000 is a bit of a come-down from that cheerful forecast.

More significantly, there are the 2.9 million Albertans who have been doxxed in what may have been the largest data breach in Canadian history when the entire provincial voters’ list packed with personal information somehow went from the so-called Republican Party of Alberta, which had acquired it legally, into a searchable database posted online by a separatist group calls the Centurion Project.

That database has since been pulled from the Internet, but the data is in the wind. This is a potentially significant problem for both Stay Free Alberta’s momentum and the machinations of the Smith Government since it would have made it easy for bad actors to sign a petition with real peoples’ names.

Well, maybe that was why some separation supporters were so confident about the outcome of their campaign.

The Centurion Project’s leader, David Parker of Take Back Alberta fame, said on social media yesterday that “the allegations that I personally received or distributed any unauthorized voter data are false. These issues involve active court proceedings and investigations. I will not be commenting further on the operations of the Centurion Project or the media speculation.”

The premier, meanwhile, is working hard to give the impression there’s nothing to see here now that Elections Alberta, the RCMP and the Edmonton Police Service are all investigating the breach.

“If a breach has been discovered, then we hope that those who are responsible are held accountable to the full extent of the law,” she said during Question Period yesterday. “We are encouraged by the fact that the EPS, RCMP and Elections Alberta are investigating.”

But as University of Alberta political science Professor Jared Wesley pointed on his Substack Sunday, “the RCMP will take years to investigate possible crimes. Elections Alberta, itself a player in this story, can act only within the increasingly narrow limits of its mandate and capacity. A legislative committee would turn this into political theatre.”

Dr. Wesley argued that only a public inquiry run by a judge can now restore faith in Alberta democracy. “Albertans should not be asked to vote in a referendum — especially one concerning the possible breakup of the country — while basic questions remain unanswered about whether the province’s voters list, petition process, election agency, referendum machinery and proponent organizations have been compromised.”

And as former RCMP intelligence manager Patrick Lennox wrote in his Substack last month, Elections Alberta is woefully unprepared to take on any investigation of this sort. “Their organizational chart demonstrates the lack of capacity to defend a provincial sovereignty referendum from foreign interference coming from extremely capable state-based adversaries,” he said.

The agency has just eight investigator positions, Mr. Lennox noted. “It is not known how many of those positions are currently filled.”

Alberta “has no independent provincial intelligence service or a provincial cyber security capacity,” he explained. “It doesn’t have a capability to trace foreign funds or dark money entering the process. It has no independent non-partisan task force set up to monitor the referendum and advise Albertans of foreign interference that is occurring in real or next to real time. … That belies a profound lack of understanding of the foreign interference threat vector, that is either willfully ignorant or intentionally aimed to abet external influence over the process.”

I guess you could argue that something like this has been coming down the pike since 2019, when that brainiac Jason Kenney, Alberta’s first UCP premier, fired Election Commissioner Lorne Gibson and rolled his office into Elections Alberta for the sin of levying $210,000 in fines on various bad actors involved the UCP leadership race that Mr. Kenney won.

After all, most of the people fined by Mr. Gibson’s office were involved in the effort by to bring down Mr. Kenney’s chief competitor, former Wildrose Party leader Brian Jean, through what came to be known as the Kamikaze campaign. Plus, Mr. Gibson had been hired by Rachel Notley’s NDP government.

In case you’re wondering where Mr. Gibson is now that we need him, he’s running an election management consultancy in Winnipeg.

If and when the judge in the First Nations case gives the nod, Elections Alberta will have 21 days to verify the separatist petition. “Should information during the verification process reveal anomalies, further steps will be taken to ensure a 95-per-cent confidence level the signatures on the petition are valid and verified,” Elections Alberta said yesterday.