Now that the metaphorical horse has departed the proverbial barn for pastures unknown, Alberta’s toothless elections agency says it’s slamming the barn door shut.
At any rate, Elections Alberta officials told the CBC yesterday that the evening before Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure had sent cease-and-desist letters to 586 people involved one way or another with the Purloined List of Electors Affair.
The national broadcaster reported that 23 of the letters were sent to people who had received the voters list from the so-called Centurion Project, the separatist third-party advertiser campaigning in support of the Stay Free Alberta/Alberta Prosperity Project citizen initiative petition that is now in the hands of Elections Alberta. They are said to have 48 hours to confirm they have complied. The remaining 545 are presumed to have accessed the list.
Well, good luck to Elections Alberta. I mean that sincerely. But that horse ain’t comin’ back.
Unsurprisingly, Elections Alberta didn’t put this information in a news release. To do that, they would have to have put on the record just how powerless they are and what a massive screw up the largest data breach in Canadian history is.
To be fair, of course, no government or organization has the power to put that genie back in the bottle. The personal information of 2.9 million Albertans is in the wind and certainly in the hands of malign actors among both our traditional adversaries, and a couple of former friends who have been revealed as adversaries. Still, anyone who has been paying attention would conclude that our former friends present a significantly bigger threat right now than even our most determined adversaries.
Meanwhile, in a news release yesterday, the office of Information and Privacy Commissioner Diane McLeod said she too has launched an investigation of the data breach. The investigation will ask five questions about whether Centurion had the authority to collect the information in the voters list, use it, disclose it, took appropriate security measures to protect it, and if it had an obligation to notify the office of the commissioner.
Alert readers can probably guess the answers to all these queries, and a second-year law student should be able to look it all up and write a report in about 15 minutes without using AI. So one suspects no one should get too excited about this development.
Moving right along, CityNews national reporter Sean Amato posted on social media yesterday that the RCMP has weighed in with a statement urging us all not to get our knickers in a twist just because our personal information can be scraped up by bad actors all over the planet.
“We appreciate the significant public interest surrounding this investigation – the apparent inappropriate release of your personal information is of great concern to the public and the RCMP,” said the commanding officer of the Alberta Mounties, Trevor Daroux. “However, the RCMP’s primary responsibility must be to protect the integrity of the investigation and therefore are limited on details that we can share publicly, including confirming comments made by third parties.”
“We encourage the public to rely on official statements released by the RCMP,” Deputy Commissioner Daroux concluded.
With respect, the public is unlikely to be reassured by a statement saying the police won’t have anything to say about its investigation, but urging us to rely only on what it has to say about the investigation.
In addition, memories are long, and many Albertans recall the force’s five-year investigation into the “Kamikaze Affair,” allegations of fraud and identity theft in Jason Kenney’s victorious 2017 campaign to lead the newly formed UCP, after which the Mounties announced no charges would be laid.
And speaking of Mr. Kenney, he said yesterday he is taking security measures to protect himself because of the data breach. “I’ve got people threatening that I will be executed following the Nuremberg trials for my crimes against humanity,” he told the CBC. “These are people who are not well, and I think most of them are probably harmless, but all it takes is one person to go too far.”
Finally, Press Progress reported yesterday that self-appointed separatist supremo Mitch Sylvestre, the gun store owner from Bonnyville, is calling on his legions to join the UCP and turn it into an official separatist party. “We have to get this to a vote,” Mr. Sylvestre said on a YouTube livestream noticed by Press Progress. “So how do we do that? We have to leverage UCP.”
And that was just yesterday!
So, some conclusions and predictions:
- With the data long gone, the Alberta government utterly lacks the knowhow, the manpower, the capability or the inclination to do anything useful about this.
- Ottawa needs to act, but is unlikely to risk it. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has other fish to fry.
- The police can determine the legal culpability of some of the well-known actors in this drama, but this is likely to take a very long time and do nothing to stop the UCP from proceeding with a separation referendum using compromised electoral lists in the hands of its allies. Someone may eventually go to jail, but it will be a small fry.
- The days when a List of Electors can reasonably be given to political parties – including the big ones with seats in the Legislature – are over. And not just in Alberta. But that doesn’t mean it won’t continue to happen.
- The separatists should calm down. They already control the UCP. This is why Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP government cannot be trusted to manage this problem.
- This story will continue to generate headlines at a feverish pace. The UCP is going to have to do something really outrageous to distract us all from the uproar. They’ll most certainly try.