Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where Alberta’s separatist movement landed itself in a hot mess, our prime minister tells European leaders how to deal with the increasingly unpredictable U.S., and more. Let’s jump in!
This was supposed to be the year that Alberta’s separatist movement graduates from a political fever dream to something resembling a credible mainstream project. There have been meetings with Trump administration officials and rhetorical support from MAGA believers eager to cheer on Canadians who say their oil-rich province should join forces with the United States. A secession vote might even happen in October.
But the push suddenly faces a credibility crisis because of a voter-data scandal. The trouble began when Jen Gerson, co-founder of independent Canadian media outlet The Line, reported that the Centurion Project, an ambitious pro-secession political machine, appeared to have access to sensitive voter data through a volunteer app connected to Alberta’s sovereignty movement. The database included the names and addresses of nearly three million Albertans, according to The Globe and Mail.
David Parker, who runs the Centurion Project, has said that the group did nothing wrong and that its volunteers used the database only to find people they already know—and did not have access to phone numbers or emails. He likened the data collection to the basic information found in phone books. That might be a comforting defense if your childhood memory of the White Pages includes voter identification numbers, private contact data, and sophisticated political profiling tools.
The Centurion App was pitched by its backers as a potentially revolutionary political organizing platform that was designed to modernize grassroots campaigning through sophisticated voter targeting, real-time volunteer coordination, and large-scale supporter identification. Emmott Kelsey, a prominent separatist, claimed that the app is “so groundbreaking that it was presented to the White House,” adding that it would “revolutionize how campaigns are run, and we’re the guinea pigs.”
After a source told Gerson that Alberta voter information was easily accessible through the app, she found her own personal data there, and then alerted Elections Alberta, the province’s election administrator. It declined to investigate, citing insufficient legal grounds under stricter rules introduced by Alberta premier Danielle Smith’s government last year that raised the evidentiary threshold for launching probes.
