The leaders of Alberta’s separatist movement spent years organizing their way into de-facto control over Alberta’s governing party, and with it the ability to direct the terms of their own referendum petition. They collected many tens of thousands of signatures, raised untold (and unknown) amounts of money and were preparing for a public vote this fall. And now, thanks to their own inestimable hubris and the weaponization of a voter list they never should have had, they might have just defeated themselves. 

The details here have been well-reported by a number of journalists, including Jeremy Appel in our own digital pages. In short, a list of electors and their personal data that belonged to the overtly separatist Alberta Republican Party was acquired by David Parker, the former head of Take Back Alberta and a longtime political ally of Premier Danielle Smith (she even attended his wedding in 2023). As Appel notes in his story, Parker “was planning to use the Centurion Project and its app to reach as many potential separatists as possible.”

Eventually, Elections Alberta and the RCMP intervened, but not before an unknown number of Centurion Project volunteers accessed and perhaps disseminated the list and its contents. No matter what happens now, and regardless of whether there are criminal consequences for the people involved, the toothpaste can’t be put back in the tube. As former RCMP major crimes investigator Neil LeMay told Global, “it........

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