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Can Alberta Keep Foreign Meddling Out of Its Secession Vote?

If we’re being honest, probably not

There are about 200 days left before we trundle to polls, through fall leaves and under gym lights behind cardboard dividers, after what will no doubt be unconscionably long waits, to decipher nine referendum questions—with a potential tenth being about whether Alberta should cut itself loose from Confederation.

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On April 10, an Edmonton court threw the breaks on that. Justice Shaina Leonard found the potential for “irreparable” harm to the treaty relationship between First Nations and the Crown (Alberta did not become a province until later) and blocked election officials from certifying the separatist petition for one month while the court renders its final decision on three matters before her.

The final decision will involve the important second order question: Is Canada ready to defend an Alberta sovereignty referendum from foreign interference? Lawyers from the Government of Alberta argued there was no evidence of foreign interference in the process to date. They also asserted that the structures were in place to insulate any potential referendum from foreign interference.

On whether there has been foreign interference in the process to date, the public record suggests strongly that there has been. I’ve treated this issue of ongoing foreign interference in this process elsewhere, as have many others, now that the Alberta Prosperity Project’s meetings with the Donald Trump administration have become mainstream news.

I’ll move on, then, to the question of whether Alberta and Canada are in any state of readiness to take on this developing national security threat. That is, are they ready to check the potential of the United States to leverage a secession referendum in Alberta into an occupation or annexation aimed at bringing about Trump’s fantasy of making Canada the fifty-first state?

Short answer: not even close.

Any secessionist referendum is a provincial political process. This gives the province jurisdiction over safeguarding its outcome from the designs of malicious foreign actors intent on loading the proverbial dice in favour of their own preferred result—a successful Leave Vote.

It should go without saying that the province has no experience running a referendum process on a question of such consequence. It has no independent provincial intelligence service—none that it has announced to the public anyway—or a provincial cybersecurity capacity. 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.

The only thing they’ve done is ask people to renew their driver’s licences so they can get citizenship markers added. That belies a profound misunderstanding of the foreign interference threat vector that is either wilfully ignorant or intentionally aimed to abet external influence over the process.

Elections Alberta is the department that would be responsible for ensuring the integrity of the referendum. Their organizational chart demonstrates the lack of capacity to head off foreign interference coming from extremely capable state-based adversaries. Just eight contract investigator positions exist. It is not known how many of those positions are currently........

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