How Did an Alberta Separatist Group Get Its Hands on the Voter List?

You can think of democracy in many ways. It is a word that stands in for a set of interconnected, abstract concepts—like freedom, equality, the right to vote in fair elections, government for the people, not the few.

But boiled down, democracy, or a democracy, is a list. The list of electors comprises the full, legal names of people who have the right to vote in an election, their addresses, unique voter identification numbers, and the polling stations they can be expected to show up at in each riding on election day.

The list of electors is sacrosanct because it constitutes the political unit that elects a democratic government. It cannot be stated more forcefully than that, but it bears repeating for emphasis. The list of electors is a democracy in its raw essence.

Alberta’s democracy was stolen. It was sold for profit. And loaded up onto a far-right mobilization app by a pro-sovereignty group called the Centurion Project. Founded by David Parker—who also founded Take Back Alberta, the hardline conservative activist network that played a major role in Premier Danielle Smith’s rise to power—the Centurion Project has close ties to the MAGA movement in the United States. Parker and his partners didn’t believe the separatist petition process to a referendum was going to work using traditional methods: town halls, door knocking, phone banking, spending regulated amounts on advertising, communicating effectively—the grunt work of running a democratic campaign.

So instead, the Centurion Project licensed a voter ID tool that Parker gained familiarity with during his time with Tucker Carlson’s Live Tour. The tool helps volunteers leverage social networks toward what political parties call a “get out the vote” or GOTV strategy. One person identifies ten people in their network favourable to the separatist cause and is responsible for getting them to the polls on referendum day. Parker argued at his Centurion Project’s opening at the Edmonton Oilfield Technical Society on April 29 that the app was instrumental in delivering Michigan to Trump in 2024 when he flipped the swing state and defeated Kamala Harris by 1.42 percent.

The main issue is that the Centurion Project is not a registered political party and therefore has no right to access the list of electors, as they did on the black market for $45,000 (or so Parker has claimed). The copy they got their hands on was unsurprisingly that of the separatist Republican Party of Alberta. This was confirmed by Elections Alberta after analysis of the list that was loaded on the Centurion Project’s app determined that the salted names used as a security measure to prevent exactly this sort of behaviour matched the 2025 copy that was given to Cameron Davies as the head of the RPA.

Registered political parties have a right of access to the voters list but must safeguard the sensitive information contained within it or face fines of up to $100,000 and up to a year in prison.

Davies is accused of being one of the architects of the so-called “kamikaze” scheme that allegedly delivered the United Conservative Party’s first leadership contest to Jason Kenney by running a sham candidate to attack Kenney’s rival. Davies later had a falling out with the party and started his own separatist counterpart. He made the trip to Washington and Mar-a-Lago in the fall of last year to kiss Trump’s ring, rub elbows with the who’s who of the far right, and drum up support for Alberta independence.

Thanks in no small part to Davies, Kenney became premier in 2019 after defeating New Democratic Party incumbent Rachel Notley. Kenney survived until David Parker and his Take Back Alberta posse executed a coup during a UCP leadership review that replaced him with their preferred further-right candidate, Danielle Smith. Said Parker, “I declared war on Jason Kenney. I would not rest until he was no longer the premier.”

“The lunatics are trying to take over the asylum, and I won’t let them” Kenney said to staff two months before he was ousted.

Smith attended Parker’s wedding. She became premier because of him, and like Kenney was previously, she’s now beholden to the lunatic faction of her base.

That 2.9 million voting-age Albertans have had their personal information circulating in the Maple MAGAsphere poses a massive public safety risk and exposes the October 19 referendum process even further to foreign influence from the global far right. We can safely assume that Alberta’s list of electors has been captured by agents of authoritarian regimes who wish Canada, as the last standing democracy in North America, all sorts of harm, unrest, and collapse.

The implications of this breach, which is likely the largest in Canadian history, will come into further relief in the coming days and weeks leading up to the referendum the UCP seems hell-bent to bring on.

To start to unpack the most pressing of these implications, we must understand that, at their hardened core, separatists are white nationalists. They would be Proud Boys, if the Proud Boys weren’t a listed terrorist entity. These are the people that blockaded Highway 2 at Coutts, amassed a cache of high-powered weapons, and plotted to kill Royal Canadian Mounted Police over COVID-19 restrictions. These are the people who parked their rigs and blared their horns for weeks and shut down Canada’s capital city while aspiring to overthrow the federal government. These are anti-authority, anti-science, anti-woke, anti-elite, anti-trans conspiracy theorists drunk on disinformation fed to them by predatory “leaders,” like David Parker and Jeff Rath and Donald Trump and Danielle Smith. They are, in other words, a dangerous crowd.

To paint them as guys doing grievance politics things misses the mark. This is something far more sinister, and we better get live to it fast. For the rest of Canada and for the federal government to think that now that the breach has been discovered, the injunction order issued, and the data base taken down, that this is all in hand would be mistaken.

It most assuredly is not.

Alberta’s democracy has been under a relentless barrage of attack by Smith’s UCP. Her separatist foot soldiers—or Centurions as they prefer to be called—just stole it. These people now have the addresses and phone numbers of every judge, every lawyer, every ex-wife, every domestic abuse victim, every cop, every professor, every activist, every journalist, every First Nations chief, every teacher, every politician, every civil servant, every elections investigator. All of our data is out there in the far-right winds that are blowing viciously across this prairie.

This is a grotesque violation of our privacy and a malicious act that should face criminal repercussions. I am comforted only by the fact that the RCMP is now investigating.

If any one of us is harmed, harassed, intimidated, or silenced, that’s on the separatists, and that’s on the UCP for emboldening and enabling them. One thing is certain: Alberta became a much more dangerous place sometime before journalist Jen Gerson confidentially reported this breach to Elections Alberta on March 31 after learning about it from an anonymous source. And our democracy became all the more tenuous as a result.

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There has been outrage at the fact that the personal information of 2.9 million Alberta electors was left to circulate in traitorous hands for a month before any action was taken by Elections Alberta. There has been disbelief expressed at Elections Commissioner Paula Hale’s response to Gerson, which stated that while her complaint was compelling, it didn’t provide reasonable grounds to direct an investigation of the matter. Reasonable grounds.

This was clarified later by Michelle Gurney, spokeswoman for Elections Alberta, as follows: “The standard of reasonable grounds is akin to the level of evidence required to arrest someone. This is a high threshold.” Yes, it is a high threshold, Ms. Gurney. And for the regulator to say that it cannot investigate unless it is presented with a package of information upon which it can reasonably arrest someone is very troubling indeed.

But outrage and disbelief at the civil servants who staff Elections Alberta is misplaced. In May of 2025, after the Liberal Party secured a minority Parliament, the UCP switched into full MAGA mode and started passing legislation that seemed geared to bring on a secession referendum. It also started tinkering in anti-democratic ways with the rules around elections. One example of this—amongst many—was Bill 54, which became the Election Statutes Amendment Act, 2025. It did three things of relevance to this discussion. The first was it set Elections Alberta’s investigative bar beyond that which common citizens’ complaints could reasonably expect to reach.

The response to Gerson is exhibit A. But it could very well be exhibit ZZZ. We know about Gerson’s complaint, because, well, she’s Jen Gerson. We don’t know how many other complaints have been concluded in the same way without investigation because Elections Alberta was unauthorized to investigate.

The second was to make it mandatory for Elections Alberta to inform anyone they were investigating that they were, in fact, investigating them. Combined with the first change, the effect was to cripple the agency by stripping investigators of the ability to conduct discreet inquiries, thus giving targets time to coordinate stories, pressure witnesses, or destroy evidence. A third change limited the length of time Elections Alberta had to investigate a complaint to a single year, down from three.

Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure warned at the time that this would make things difficult for the regulator. He argued that none of the significant investigations Elections Alberta had conducted over the previous five years would have concluded under the new authorities. He noted in documents sent to justice minister Mickey Amery that “we are not aware of any other jurisdiction in Canada that has imposed a similar standard to initiate investigations.” But Smith reached deep into the doublespeak bag and pulled out these lines in defence of Bill 54: “democracy is the foundation of our freedoms and the source of legitimacy for governments at every level. It must be protected, strengthened, and defended, and that’s exactly what we are doing.”

No, Premier Smith. That’s not what you are doing. And every voting-age Albertan understands that now in a very intimate way. What you are doing is fundamentally undermining our democracy. You are allowing it to be stolen by traitors and paving the legislative pathway to Canada’s annexation. You are endangering every person who would stand for Canada in this province. And that’s a heck of a lot of us.

South of the border, Trump’s federal justice department is suing thirty states for their voter lists. The Alberta case provides us a window into why. In America, states administer federal elections. And it is states, therefore, that are the guardians of the voter lists. Trump wants to reverse that. People are worried about mass disenfranchisement and other forms of malfeasance that will undermine their ability to vote in free and fair elections if the voter lists fall into the hands of a justice department that now routinely targets the president’s perceived political enemies and, as a result, has been politicized beyond redemption.

Rightfully so.

The outcomes of the thirty court cases are one thing, but the fact that this is happening at all is a lightning bolt into the ballast of American democracy. It is designed to destabilize and unmoor. And that is exactly what has been happening in Alberta. Our democracy has been stolen and betrayed by treasonous separatists and their sycophantic political enablers.

This episode has made perfectly plain how completely unprepared Alberta is to undertake a legitimate referendum on the secession of the province from Confederation. Fraud. Foreign interference. Malfeasance at the highest level. Nothing can be trusted now.

Reprinted from “The Theft and Betrayal of Alberta’s Democracy” by Patrick Lennox (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.