What are we to make of that “mysterious cash surge” in donations to the Republican Party of Alberta just before the June 2025 by-election in the Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills riding?
At the time, RPA Leader Cameron Davies was running in the by-election to replace former United Conservative Party MLA Nathan Cooper, the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, who had resigned his seat to take up duties as Alberta’s trade representative in the Canadian Embassy in Washington D.C.*
Earlier this week, The Toronto Star reported that in the spring of 2025, money began to pour into the coffers of the RPA. “In the first half of 2025, donors gave nearly $190,000 – a remarkable jump for a party that reported zero contributions the year before,” said the Star’s report.
“The money came from fewer than 50 people, with more than half of them handing over $5,000, the maximum amount allowed under Alberta rules,” the story continued.
The Star’s reporters, as often happens in such journalistic investigations, accumulated a lot of interesting facts, but were unable to provide many insights into what the heck was actually going on, or what the motivations of some of the donors may have been. Interestingly, a couple of apparently politically polyamorous British Columbia donors once had a connection with the B.C. NDP.
In the event, by the way, the UCP candidate in the by-election, Tara Sawyer, won with a clear majority of the vote. New Democrat Beverley Toews placed second, and Mr. Davies third.
So what does all this mean? Not clear. In the end we are left with more dots than lines connecting them.
At least four of the donations appear to have been made by people who live outside Alberta, the newspaper reported, which is clearly illegal here. Mr. Davies told the Star, in the reporters’ words, “that to his knowledge, anyone who contributed using an out of province address was ‘not permitted’ to donate.” So was the money returned, as required by law? Presumably the Star asked. It provided no answer.
Elections Alberta, as we are coming to expect, was unhelpful, telling the reporters it does not comment on parties’ financial disclosures – which may be a rule, but under the circumstances is hardly reassuring.
I asked Lorne Gibson about this. The former Alberta Election Commissioner was fired by Jason Kenney’s version of the UCP in November 2019, supposedly to save money but obviously because he had too effectively enforced the law when he investigated campaign financing violations by some of Mr. Kenney’s supporters in the party’s leadership race. He now runs an election consulting business in Manitoba.
“I would say from the sketchy details that at least some of the donations themselves would appear to be illegal,” Mr. Gibson observed. “Some of the contributors appear to be prohibited contributors due to residency alone.”
Beyond that, he added, “based on the pattern of when all of these contributions came in and the amounts, I would also be looking at a possible violation of s. 34(1) of the Act.”
That section of the Election Finances and Contributions Disclosure Act states that “A person or entity must not contribute to a registered party, registered constituency association, registered prospective candidate association, registered candidate or registered leadership contestant (a) funds not belonging to the person or entity, or (b) funds given to the person or entity for the purpose of making a contribution to that registered party, registered constituency association, registered prospective candidate association, registered candidate or registered leadership contestant.”
“It is also illegal for a registered political party to accept prohibited contributions and incumbent upon them to refuse to accept them, to report them to the (Chief Electoral Officer) and to return them to the contributor or to the CEO if the contributor cannot be identified,” Mr. Gibson said.
“I always felt that there was something wrong with returning prohibited contributions to the contributor,” he commented. “I felt that these funds should be forfeited. However, because the law required parties to return prohibited funds to the contributor, I would usually penalize the prohibited contributor an amount equal to the prohibited contribution so that there was some sort of penalty for the illegal activity. Otherwise there would not have been any consequence.”
One doubts we can be confident Elections Alberta will now do the same if a case can be made.
In May 2019, Mr. Gibson’s office levied fines adding up to $12,000 against Mr. Davies for six separate offences related to irregular campaign contributions to the UCP leadership campaign of candidate Jeff Callaway, Global News reported at the time.
Mr. Davies was then manager of Mr. Callaway’s campaign. “In February, Davies was fined $15,000 by the election commissioner for two counts of obstruction of an investigation,” the Global story also said.
“Callaway’s leadership bid has been dogged by allegations it was a kamikaze campaign with the sole purpose of targeting Kenney’s main opponent, Brian Jean. Callaway ultimately dropped out of the race and threw his support behind Kenney,” that story stated.
Elections Alberta also admitted in April this year it was investigating unauthorized online publication of the RPA’s copy of the Alberta List of Electors by a company called The Centurion Project Ltd., effectively doxxing 2.9 million Albertans.
Can we now have confidence that Elections Alberta – understaffed, underfunded and beleaguered by the UCP’s determination to hold a highly contentious separation referendum and nine additional MAGA-influenced policy referenda on Oct. 19 – is capable of ensuring the security of any vote?
On Wednesday, the agency said it has received 25,000 applications for the 60,000 positions it will require to count up to 45 million complicated ballots by hand within 48 hours, as demanded by the UCP.
The answer is clearly that Elections Alberta is in no position to ensure a fair ballot count and that no matter how the dust settles, the referenda voting and count will be a gong show.
No jurisdiction genuinely committed to democracy would allow such a vote to go ahead in these circumstances.
*Mr. Cooper, by the way, continues to be listed on the RPA’s website as a supporter of Alberta separation, despite his role for more than a year as an accredited Canadian diplomat.
The UCP counties to attack our democracy and does not care one iota about playing by the rules. This is the very thing you can expect in a dictatorship. The UCP weakened the powers of Elections Alberta, so more nefarious activities happen, and no consequences result.
The only way to effectively deal with these shenanigans is to not only introduce federal legislation under the criminal code to effectively ban such politically financing, and assure that those involved are prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Personally, I would go one step further and assure that those convicted will be publicly ridiculed for their activities and executed by the slowest means available. A short-drop is the best option.
Smith, the UPC, the RPA and Elections Alberta, I was going to describe them as a quagmire, but I think cesspool is more appropriate. I don’t think Mexico is as corrupt as what Alberta has become. Albertans need to realize, that this swamp needs to be drained and sterilized and the sooner the better.
Thank goodness that we have The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail to report on these things. Where is Post Media while all of this goes on? However, Post Media is not entirely useless, we still require paper to wrap fish or line the bird cage.
As for Elections Alberta, they are a toothless tiger. We are watching a coup in slow motion.
“No jurisdiction genuinely committed to democracy would allow such a vote to go ahead in these circumstances.”
That’s right. I’ve been saying here for some time that we need an intervention. Cancelling the whole corrupt gong show would be best, but we all know that’s not going to happen.
https://unric.org/en/the-role-of-the-united-nations-in-ensuring-free-and-fair-elections/
Now here’s a stroll down memory lane with a former U.S. Marine.
https://www.canadianaffairs.news/2025/06/22/republican-party-of-alberta-leader-interview/
Perhaps he’ll lead the charge when all the man-children fight for supremacy over each other in their Roman Centurion/crusader uniforms. Alternatively, they could all stay home and paint Warhammer figurines in mom’s basement. They have dark horses in Warhammer:
“Chaos & Dark Steeds: Ill-tempered, flesh-eating mounts of the Northmen, or the dark steeds favored by the forces of Chaos.”
The corruption is out of control, and it started with Jason Kenney. The Alberta NDP must promise public inquiries followed by serious democratic reform of the entire political system for the next election. We ca no longer continue to pretend this is remotely a democracy.
Alfredo Louro: The damage the UCP and Danielle Smith did to our democracy, let alone to anything else they got involved with will be very difficult to eradicate. It will take years to undo the damage. We still are suffering from Ralph Klein’s harsh cuts to essential services. Any portfolio the UCP has managed, they have ruined.
Marlaina could not care less about democracy. The referendum will be a gong show, but that’s probably by design so that when Albertans reject her hare-brained racist nonsense, she can just use the confusion and chaos to push through her authoritarian agenda.
Public politics can be more manipulative than persuasive. Partisan propaganda overtly persuades, but if false or misleading it manipulates covertly. A couple cases of beer happen to be in the back of the pickup when “the boys” are given a lift to the polling station they wouldn’t have otherwise made. It’s manipulation if a quid pro quo is suggested about which party the boys should cast for. Having to run a gauntlet of intimidating goons or police at a voting-place entrance “persuades” some citizens to not vote (when they might have cast for the party promising to remedy electoral interference) but not who to vote for. Manipulation by mootification.
It’s impossible to eradicate petty electoral corruption , but its effect is negligible at more populous polling stations where the vast majority of votes are cast. False advertising of course risks embarrassing the propagator if found out, and “negative advertising” can land partisan propagandists upon their own petards —just ask Conservative campaign manager and pollster Allen Gregg after he launched campaign ads ridiculing Liberal leader Jean Chrétien’s facial palsy during the 1993 federal election: the incumbent Conservatives who’d won the two largest parliamentary majorities back-to-back were reduced to two seats. (Gregg, who initially blew the disaster off with a glib “negative advertising works,” eventually admitted his costly misjudgement when the reality of such a huge thrashing finally sank in. It took a few years…)
Other factors ultimately finished the federal ProgCons, but the Chrétien attack ad underscored that the bad old days of gooning, vote-buying, ballot-stuffing, and yellow journalism typical of the 1890s had become as obsolete as the buggy-whip. We hadn’t yet seen Harper’s knee-to-groin assault on parliamentary and political decorum. Chrétien won two more majorities before the political manipulations of globalizing neoliberalism shell-and-pead factional schism in every federal party, replete with partisan zombies, orphans and Frankensteins.
The art of persuading or manipulating the electorate thence devolved from the overtly political and narrowly partisan to the pseudoscience of warfare between rival statistical positions supposed to justify certain contending ideals. The effect is politically polarizing—as witnessed among economists, environmentalists, sociologists, academics, entrepreneurs, and scientists in diversifying media of free speech. Taken as a whole medium, it’s difficult to manipulate an educated electorate without somehow excising, instead of exercising, the free speech part.
When conservatism was supposed to represent the interests of capitalism and private wealth against those of trade unionism and social welfare, the partisan-right realized it couldn’t beat back the demands of liberal democracy to more equitably share privately-generated wealth, so it atypically volunteered to join modernity by way of right-wing “think tanks” and market fundamentalism (respectively counterparts to universities and socialism). After its image makeover, the right’s prescriptions could only be rationalized by sweetening with “trickledown,” a grand economic theory a still-sophisticated, informed society— somewhat in a quandary between doomsaying and denialism—would risk by contract. It’s perfectly democratic to make a mistake, the constitutional term-limit presumably affording insurance and a good way to learn not to do it again. Ahh, the good old days before Ai and worship of genuine stupidity.
The political-partisan crudities of the pre-War past at this point being unacceptable and unavailable to politicians, the only frontier left was purely psephological—that is, to manipulate the very mechanics of voting in order to favour one party over others. Democracy is simple in theory: citizens are represented in law-making in proportion with the number of votes cast for various candidates, the winner presumed to represent most voters or the largest bloc of voters, represented in the executive; the smaller blocs of MPs representing their voters in open parliamentary debate, committees, and the news medium. However, the rules of conducting elections—the field of psephology—are much more complicated, involving necessary details which afford opportunity for the devil to get in. Every aspect can be perfidiously infiltrated, from registration of parties, their canvassers and ballot scrutineers, of candidates, and of voters, to rules about who may donate to parties, and how much, campaign funding rules including the sources and nature of partisan propaganda, and conducting the vote itself, vote-counting, and if necessary, re-counting, &c. Given these susceptibilities, electoral authorities must closely invigilate the conduct of elections and may punish rule-breakers to deter others from trying the same.
An electoral office must be impeccably independent of partisan influence. There can’t be any kind of relative authority like it looks in Danielle Smith’s dysmocratic Albetaria; it must be absolutely absolute. Let’s not defuse politics and partisanship completely. The electoral authority is naturally supposed to be impartial, but strictly only in the partisan sense; it may take a purely political position with respect policies that affect its absolutely independent authority. When any governing party starves the office to the point it cannot do its job, for example, it is perfectly legitimate for the chief electoral officer to publicly advise the government to remedy the shortcoming with adequate funding forthwith, just as it would be to take legal action by way of court order. That could then include the fining and/or arrest— and even jailing of the cabinet ministers responsible. This is politics in a necessarily very narrow sense.
The HarperCons repeatedly broke election rules so the party was fined for its “in-an-out” campaign-funding scam, its hacks were punished for purposely targeted “Robocalls” to misinform voters where to vote, and one CPC MP, Harper’s former press secretary Dean del Mastro was jailed for exceeding allowable campaign-funding limits and then lying about it. Federal Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand (2007-16) exemplified how to exact the law but remain perceivably impartial and nonpartisan, despite the CPC’s persistent public goading that he favoured its rival Liberal party and the Loyal Opposition NDP. He wisely ignored it.
It comes with the territory that the electoral authority MUST prosecute infractions else look partisan for not doing it. It may not look “relatively impartial.” The difference between the HarperCons’ attempts to sweat Mayrand and the UCP’s so-far successful attempts to favour separatists by way of interfering with electoral rules is that Danielle Smith is gormless in a way Harper never was, and simply ignores what is politic and proper with presumed impunity. Even more heedless are separatist leaders who imply that they’ll get The Donald to rescue them from Canadian sovereign law —maybe even if they fail to win the Referendum. “Immunity” and “impunity” sound like the kind of rhyming slogan Poilievre would concoct, but it’s the lifeblood of the secession movement for which a nonpartisan electoral office is the enemy, never mind that the real context is the vast, insurmountable proportion of voters who are patriotic Canadians.
As long’s the Alberta electoral officer at least perfunctorily complains about UCP intrusion into his office’s authority and work, all is not completely lost. Abusing his office through probably-illegal legislative/fiat work-arounds and intentional starvation of its capacity too invigilate, however illegal it is and whatever legal consequences it will cause, is plainly about performing an important ritual for the separatists in the UCP caucus and party: the so-called “separation referendum.” As they say: marry in haste, repent at leisure.
It is tactical manoeuvring into a mythic position where the UCP pulls a bigger sword out of the Psephologer’s Stone to use against its rivals, foolhardy presumptuousness showing by its imagined immunity from whatever comeuppance it deserves without any heed of legal consequences, especially if it loses power.
The most frightful presumption of any governing party that pursues this route is that it will never lose power: there’s only one way to do that—- rig or hobble fair and democratic elections.
This isn’t a time for political discretion —‘out behind the woodshed’ kinda stuff; for inflicting such an egregious offence against the very root of our democracy demands stricture not lenience. Short of public flogging of the perpetrators, serious consequences are in order by mandate, not by discretion.
Failure to do so invites the crudest of psephological offences such as we see in tRump’s USA today. It’s probably not by accident that Smith’s referendum is to be held just before the Orange-Goo-Tanned One actually demonstrates how bad partisan interference can get if (when) he tries to nullify midterms in which, by every measure, he meets his real comeuppance.
Finally, it’s not just the partisan-right which is guilty of electoral interference. The BC NDP committed a number of psephological sins during BC’s latest (third) provincial referendum on electoral systems. Cabinet itself picked the alternatives to First-Past-the-Post; perceivable conflict of interest was bad enough, but worse was the ballot option to approve a trial period of two terms if voters approved of one if the alternative varieties of proportional representation; a trial period would have effectively catapulted elections into the arena of partisan political football where it has no business being. It might have invited perennial accusations of vote-rigging and promises of implementing electoral systems more-favourable to the propounder at every election. Fortunately BC voters rejected pro-rep (for the 3rd time) and the danger was mooted. But it never should have happened; it did because partisan politicians interfered with what was properly the Chief Electoral Officer’s exclusive bailiwick. (Aside: the voting system used mail-ins, but with a simple-majority threshold the resulting margin either way could have been smaller than the expected percentage of fraudulent votes inevitable with mail-ins; a supermajority threshold should have been required to avoid that possibility which would have caused a firestorm of controversy had the result been close. Happily it wasn’t close ).
The danger is always present, perhaps now more than ever because of Maple MAGA copycats of tRump, so the electoral authority absolutely must be strict and be seen to be so. There is no other way.
There is nothing more to be said since it has already been said. Sad, sickening, the new mode.
Too true. It has been said over and over and over. But the sayers are preaching to the choir; the unwashed in rural Alberta will continue their cult-like support of their “conservative” idol as they have done since the beginning. All there is left to wail is, “Oh, woe is me!”
“Interestingly, a couple of apparently politically polyamorous British Columbia donors once had a connection with the B.C. NDP.” I don’t find this all that odd. Many political operatives and staffers are merely mercenary hired guns who will work for anyone willing to hire them, and so can work for a New Democrat in one campaign or government and a Conservative in another.