Edmonton-South MLA Thomas Dang was doing no more than recognizing the reality that his political career is finished when he had a spokesperson send media a statement yesterday saying he will not be seeking re-election in the next general election.
Mr. Dang, who at 20 was the youngest MLA ever elected in Alberta when he won his seat in 2015, also said he has withdrawn his request to rejoin the NDP Caucus in the Legislature.
Unlike some political leaders, Opposition Leader Rachel Notley isn’t needlessly cruel, but she’s a tough-minded politician and in light of the revelations about Mr. Dang’s effort to hack into Alberta Health’s COVID-19 vaccine passport website there was no way she could permit him to run again for the NDP.
Soon after RCMP raided Mr. Dang’s home in December 2021 and seized computer equipment, he offered his resignation to the party and has sat as an Independent in the Legislature ever since.
Ms. Notley said at the time that “our caucus has a long-standing policy that members under active police investigation will not sit in the caucus.” So it’s not like he wouldn’t have been required to leave if he hadn’t made the offer.
In hindsight, there was never much chance that Mr. Dang would be able to run again as a New Democrat.
At this point, the optics of readmitting him to caucus would have been a disaster for the NDP, exploited to the hilt by the scandal-plagued United Conservative Party, which has grabbed onto the issue like a drowning man coming upon a piece of flotsam in a stormy sea.
The UCP will probably try a few more times to remind voters of Mr. Dang’s misdeed, but the issue likely to fade pretty quickly now that he has announced his exit from politics.
Mr. Dang, who was studying computer science at the University of Alberta when he was elected, characterized his effort to use Premier Jason Kenney’s birthday and vaccination date to gain access to the Alberta Health Services database as a “security test” to highlight vulnerabilities in the system.
That may well have been Mr. Dang’s intention. RCMP and Crown Prosecutors did decide not to lay criminal charges against him. But the details of the “brute-force attack” he used to try gain entry to the system looked terrible.
Regardless of his intentions, Mr. Dang’s error in judgment was a serious one and with a trial date set for next Wednesday on charges under the Health Information Act, it was time to end the embarrassment.
He said he will remain in the Legislature as an Independent until the next election is called.
“I continue to believe that Rachel Notley and Alberta’s NDP are the government we need to create a better Alberta for all,” Mr. Dang said. “I believe my continued candidacy for the Alberta NDP distracts from the important work ahead.”
“I want to thank the constituents of Edmonton-South for putting their faith in me for the last seven years—it has been the honour of my lifetime to represent them and fight for them and all Albertans.”
It’s sad to see a young politician with enormous potential brought down by a stupid mistake, but this way he’s owned up to it, and can face whatever the court decides and move on with his life.
“This is too bad,” tweeted retired Alberta NDP leader Brian Mason yesterday, lamenting the foolish mistake that derailed Mr. Dang’s political future. “He has lots of other choices though, and I wish him all the best.”
AIMCo says original investment in troubled European theatre chain was $347M
The Alberta Investment Management Corp. yesterday issued a statement saying its initial investment in 2013 in a troubled European movie theatre chain was $347 million Cdn.
“It represented a small part of our overall Private Equity portfolio which has performed very well for our clients,” said the statement emailed by AIMCo Stakeholder Relations Director Dénes Németh. “Our Private Equity holdings returned 66 per cent in 2021 with a four-year annualized net return of 22 per cent. These figures include any and all impact from Vue.”
The statement, however, did not specify the size of AIMCo’s current loss on the share cancellation that was reported by the Globe and Mail on July 14. That sum may be significantly larger than the original investment, because the European company is said to have done quite well for AIMCo for several years before it sank into financial difficulties.
The Globe story said a “debt restructuring” at Vue International would wipe out the investments made by AIMCo, which manages Alberta’s public sector investments, and the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, which bought into the company at the same time in 2013.
Both AIMCo and OMERS were reported in 2018 to be looking for a way out of the investment.
It’s unfortunate that Thomas Dang did what he did. It does expose serious flaws in the government’s own handling and storage of information. The R.C.M.P are acting swiftly here, but yet it is taking what seems like an eternity to investigate the leadership for the head honcho of the UCP. With AIMCo, if the UCP is still intent on using them to manage people’s pensions, it’s going to get worse.
I find it interesting that AHS apparently had no clue what happened until Mr. Dang reported his own activity. If this was a brute force attack, implying thousands of repeated attacks over a number of days, why did AHS not discover this malicious activity in a timely manner and take measures to defend against it? If AHS is that clueless about cyber security, how many other times have they been breached? Sad that the Kenney government is unable to provide even basic cyber security for Albertans’ health information.
Cool: This is an extremely important question. DJC
The AHS Chief Information Officer should have answers to those questions.
https://www.rebootcommunications.com/speaker_info/penny-rae/
I don’t think Thomas Dang was looking for my health information, but I got a notice from AHS several months ago that my information had been breached. It wasn’t even a personalized letter, just a form letter. This points to a need to tighten up security.
Companies sometimes hire hackers to test the weak points in their firewalls, so Thomas Dang probably has ample career opportunities waiting for him.
For real, If it was indeed the premiers birthday and date of vaccination, WHAT KIND OF PASSWORD IS THAT. Guessing your password is not the same as a brute force attack, which our comrade has pointed out often takes days and thousands of permutations of possible U/P combinations. This is such a weird story.
My guess is that, for ideological and politically tactical reasons ulterior to the ostensible purpose of the Covid-vax passport system, the UCP figured it’d work if it didn’t work.
The reminiscence of conspiracy theorizing —insofar as overweening squid-inking and delusional overconfidence is concerned —is ever palpable amongst these snickering public-responsibility saboteurs. In other words, the answer to this excellent question is probably hidden somewhere along the kinked chain of superimplicated embellishment, if detectable at all. After all, if one is purposely trying to hide something, there’s no need to accommodate future reference. That’s how the neo-right gets to “The End of History.”
The answer to your question is: “If we make enough noise about what a bad thing Mr. Dang did, hopefully nobody asks.”
Dang was our MLA and it was shock to us that he did this. However it certainly makes the UCP look really stupid when we have seen all the stupid antics in their brand of governing and what they were able to get away with. Hats off to Notley and Dang for taking care of the situation and showing Albertans they do care about them.
Alan K. Spiller: Notice how the head honcho of the UCP makes things worse, and tries to announce what he wants to do about it, over a weekend. Again, nobody has commented here.
https://edmontonsun.com/news/politics/what-is-going-on-with-albertas-gas-prices/wcm/66e386fd-0dd1-4109-ad03-a687bb73694a/amp/
I see where Pierre Poilievre is so assure of himself he is refusing to attend the next leadership debate. Good for him. Showing Canadians how arrogant he is might not be very smart. From what I have been reading in blogs in eastern newspapers he might not be as popular as he thinks he is. Of course he is a shoe in , in the prairie provinces they are so easy to fool. The conservatives in my world not so much.
Alan K. Spiller: It would be really bad if Danielle Smith became premier of Alberta, and Pierre Poliveire became our Prime Minister. The amount of damage they would do would be catastrophic. Many would be affected by their bad policies, but so many people can’t see that. It’s unfortunate.
Its too bad about Mr. Dang. I do believe his intentions were to bring attention to a flaw, but as always, those in power in the UCP and AHS do not like to be embarrassed. So they have now focused on bringing him down. Its too bad they could not have been as focused on security to begin with, which was the original problem. However, his is the same fate that often face whistle blowers, so if you are going to expose incompetence or worse, you have to be sure they can’t punish you. For those that can’t be sure, anonymous envelopes and anonymous tips often work well.
However, Mr. Dang is young and hopefully will recover from this. Unlike certain current UCP Premiers, he actually has other useful skills to fall back on. Should we ever wonder why sometimes the best and brightest avoid politics and we instead get incompetent bible school drops outs with out any real world work experience, this might be a good story to remember to explain why.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I hope AIMCo sorts out its investment problems, however I suspect that will have to wait until a more competent Premier is in charge. The problem with incompetence at the top is it becomes pervasive. So, it affects how AHS is run and it affects other bodies like AIMCo, etc.. .
These problems are not isolated incidents, but a sign of a UCP government that just is not very good at managing anything. There are many other examples over the last few years as well. It would be good to remember this in the upcoming election.
One has to wonder why Notley appointed Dang to be the NDP Ethics critic? The timelines around the appointment are particularly interesting.
“I continue to believe that Rachel Notley and Alberta’s NDP are the government we need to create a better Alberta for all,” Mr. Dang said.
And yes, I can see why those who would run a brute force attack on a healthcare website during a pandemic would like the NDP.
“And yes, I can see why those who would run a brute force attack on a healthcare website during a pandemic would like the NDP.”
Yeah, the NDP has a long history of torpedoing health care in Canada. C’mon man give your head a shake. There are a ton of valid criticisms you could make of the NDP. This is barely less absurd than claiming Trudeau is a communist dictator.
They do, when they support the status quo funding model based on transfers from the federal government.
Its a political issue for them to keep government unions as the sole beneficiary of healthcare budgets. Want better healthcare, make the unions bigger.
Unfortunately, unions bigger means everyone is poorer. So now we are stuck with bad healthcare.
How bad is it?
Check this out:
https://c2cjournal.ca/2022/07/social-cruelty-the-canadian-health-care-systems-government-created-failings/
We are number 69, or worse.
Back in my day, all our web applications had to be tested against the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top ten web application security risks before the app could be put into production. Judging by that Dang affair, AHS failed A01, A04, A07, A09 and possibly A05 & A06. of the 2021 OWASP top ten security risks.
https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/
The troubles with Dang are in small measure compared to the tomfoolery caused by the UCP. If Notley is being hard-nosed about the conduct of her MLAs, while being tough on the misdeeds of the UCP, it’s important to remember that, in Alberta, taking the moral high-ground can only get you so far. At some point, Notley has to accept the reality that enforcing caucus conduct and discipline is no different than cutting off your nose to spite your face.
But if Notley must wield the hammer against someone, how about her political operatives and organizers, who have caused many well-publicized outbreaks of harassment and attacks against party volunteers? Going after your own MLAs, but leaving the backroom gang to have their way all the time does make Notley appear Kenney-like.
I want the names of these operatives named and I want their heads on platters.
Would be nice if all parties, both provincial and federal, didn’t allow those under active police investigation to sit in caucus. It is admirable of Dang to own up to his mistake and accept responsibility for it, likely will have successful career in the private sector now.
You know, when competent organizations realize they have been the victim of a benevolent hacker (this would be a person “harmlessly” – no malicious intent or action – breaching their security, then alerting them to the manner and method used) they often hire that hacker and only rarely prosecute them.