As Alberta careens toward a chaotic and divisive vote on separation seemingly drafted to discourage the United Conservative Party’s dominant separatist faction from trying to force Premier Danielle Smith out as party leader, her cabinet on Thursday approved a temporary policy the Opposition NDP says is intended to help separatists.
The cabinet order – Order-in-Council 314/2026 – says copies of the list of electors now given to political parties will include only the number of voters in each municipality and voting area. No names, addresses, phone numbers or the like.
The problem with this from the perspective of the NDP Opposition and presumably that of every other political party is that the new list will make it impossible for scrutineers to check if the right person is voting.
Ergo, said NDP House Leader Christina Gray in a news release yesterday afternoon, “once again, the UCP changes the rules in an unprecedented way, at the last minute, to help their separatist friends.”
“We are worried the UCP is opening the door for voter fraud,” she explained. “Parties like ours scrutineering the vote won’t have enough information to know who those voters are. We won’t even know if there were 24 voters claiming the same address.”
“We won’t be able to tell if the same name is voting dozens of times,” she added during a conversation with reporters yesterday.
According to a statement the office of Justice Minister Mickey Amery gave to The Canadian Press yesterday, but which was not published on the government’s website where citizens can read the explanation for themselves, the point of this sudden policy change is because “Albertans must have confidence that their personal information is being protected.”
“We take the privacy and security of Albertans’ information very seriously, and protecting that information remains our top priority,” the statement said.
The irony in this being introduced only 32 days before the referendum is that the government didn’t seem to be taking voters’ privacy all that seriously last spring, when a copy of the entire voters list given to the separatist Republican Party of Alberta found its way onto the Internet.
While a judge ordered it removed from the Internet, the information remains in the wind, effectively doxxing 2.9 million adult Albertans, including almost everyone in Alberta reading this post. The RPA claims it did nothing wrong. Until Thursday, the government has had very little to say about what is thought to have been the largest data breach in Canadian history.
So blocking scrutineers from using the list now to do their job, which is essential to citizen confidence in democracy, presumably protects no one’s personal information but may, as the NDP argues, makes fraud easier.
Mr. Amery and his office had nothing to say about the NDP’s concern, or why the cabinet order says the policy the government claims is necessary now will expire at the end of the year.
As for Elections Alberta, which appears to be in a state of near collapse, it will still be working from the old list of electors, the one with all their private information.
Meanwhile, Elections Alberta admitted in a news release yesterday that it is still roughly 35,000 human beings short of the number of electoral officers it needs to conduct voting on Oct. 19!
Thirty days from now, the government will not only present Albertans with the divisive separation referendum it never campaigned on but with nine additional confusing and dishonest referendum questions designed to drum up support for MAGA-influenced immigration policies and constitutional changes.
Ballots will all have to be counted by hand because the UCP apparently didn’t understand the difference between voting machines, featured in many MAGA conspiracy claims about Donald Trump’s lack of success in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and the vote tabulators used in Alberta.