David Parker and his separatist group the Centurion Project know where you live, and they shouldn’t.

How? According to Elections Alberta, Centurion illegally got their hands on the voter registry.

How’d we find out? Elections Alberta apparently knew at least as early as March 31, when centre-right political commentator Jen Gerson sent them a tip. At the time, the commissioner declined to investigate. But last week, posters spotted a Centurion training video for their volunteers on YouTube—which quickly ended up doing the rounds on social media—in which a trainer allegedly admitted where the data was from and demonstrated how much information it contained by displaying a file with Rachel Notley’s address and contact information.

I’d like to verify that claim and show you the video, but Centurion pulled everything from their YouTube when the scandal broke, so we’re operating in a bit of fog-of-war here.

That new video evidence seems to have put Elections Alberta’s feet to the fire because on Thursday, they sought and got a court injunction against Parker and his group. The night prior our good friend Jeremy Appel, covering a Centurion event in Edmonton, was treated to the sight of Elections Alberta and Edmonton Police showing up to serve Parker a cease-and-desist letter.

Parker says he paid someone $45,000 for the data Centurion fed into their app, and won’t say who, citing an NDA. But Elections Alberta say they know. The agency ‘salts’ the voter roll before they send it out to political parties with a few fake entries here and there so that if anyone leaks it, they’ll know who. And in this case they found the list came from the Republican Party of Alberta, a very small political party affiliated with the separatist movement.

It doesn’t help that there aren’t many trustworthy characters involved in any of this. Parker has a long history of lying to the media and is already on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars in fines for violating election law. On the Republican Party of Alberta side, the leader is Cameron Davies—who you might recall as one of the guys funneling illegal corporate donations to the pro-Kenney ‘kamikaze candidate’ campaign back in the 2017 UCP leadership race.

Why would the Centurion Project want this data at all? To do what we in the biz call relational organizing—a campaign strategy where rather than reaching out to voters yourself, you harness the social networks of your volunteers. The American right is presently a little enamored with it, with a number of campaigns down there using tools like Voteatron’s 10X app, and maybe that’s how the idea got over to Parker.

This particular variation on the tactic involves showing a list of local voters to your volunteers and then having your volunteers ‘claim’ the ones they know. The thought is that by getting your volunteers to make that commitment, they’re more likely to follow through. Nothing necessarily nefarious there.

The problem is that David Parker’s Centurion Project isn’t a political party and has no right to your personal details, and they certainly didn't have the right to put it all up in an open database. So now we have your personal data and mine all out there, acquired illegally, up and accessible to malicious characters of all sorts for at least a month. I feel very anxious when I think about what someone fleeing abuse or avoiding a stalker has to deal with now, and the thought of all the internet’s telemarketers and scammers having our contact information isn’t great either.

The Premier has been tight-lipped about the whole incident, only making a brief statement that “those responsible should be held accountable under the law.”

This is a developing story and I expect more details to emerge over the next week. For more about it, I recommend Jeremy’s video interview with Jen Gerson on his Substack, The Orchard.

Sundries

• Public Interest Alberta, a long-running Edmonton group advocating for civil rights and social welfare, is holding its annual conference in the capital city next weekend. As part of the festivities, The Strategists, a Calgary-based political podcast with a centre-right perspective, is hosting a live recording at St. Andrew’s United Church the night of the 9th.
  
  
• Distressingly-low polling numbers for Naheed Nenshi have political commentator David Climenhaga wondering if we’re about to see the knives come out for the struggling Alberta NDP leader.
  
  
• The deadline for the citizen’s initiative petition demanding a referendum on separation (the separatist one, not Thomas Lukaszuk’s) is very soon: they have to wrap up collecting signatures this Saturday, May 2nd. The campaign claims they hit the threshold for their petition to succeed back in March.
  
  
• Calgary Ward 13 councillor Dan McLean says he’s making the jump from municipal politics to run for the UCP provincially. McLean, who leans towards the right-radical populist set himself, should fit right in.
  
  
• We’re delighted to hear of the founding of a new Canadian political journalism cooperative, the De Facto Journalism Co-Op. The team features a number of writers from The Tyee and Press Progress, so I expect they’ll be frequently writing about matters here in Alberta and next door in BC.
  
  
• Progress Alberta and The Progress Report have updated our statements of principles and journalistic practices. We are seeking new contributors. If you’re interested in writing for The Report, please take a look at our submission guidelines. Activists, student journalists and new journalists are as welcome as veteran writers.

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