The Centurion Project Scandal Ensnares the UCP

It takes a certain ingenuity for a crooked government to keep its scandals hidden.

Fortunately — or unfortunately, depending on your perspective — that’s a talent Danielle Smith and the United Conservative Party seem to lack.

On Monday the Opposition NDP revealed in a news release it had “obtained video evidence that appears to show that a senior member of the United Conservative Party party executive and a member of the UCP caucus staff, people that are in the Premier’s inner circle, attended the April 16 online meeting of the Centurion Project.”

The Centurion Project is the corporate entity run by separatist activist David Parker that is right at the centre of perhaps the largest data breach in Canadian history, which effectively doxxed 2.9 million Alberta voters.

The Centurion Project was registered as a third-party advertiser in the separatist “Stay Free Alberta” petition campaign.

“This meeting provided training to volunteers on how to use the separatists’ project database that is at the centre of this data breach of three million Albertans’ electoral data,” the NDP said.

A list of the 80 people who attended the April 16 meeting and a video recording of the call, the NDP release said, “identify that a ‘Rob Smith’ and an ‘Arundeep Sandhu’ were in attendance. The President of the UCP is named Rob Smith and the UCP Caucus Director of Stakeholder Relations is named Arundeep Sandhu.”

Let’s stop right here to note that the UCP vociferously denies that party president Smith, who is no relation to the premier, was the Rob Smith at the meeting.

The party told the CBC Smith was at a fundraiser elsewhere and huffily demanded a full retraction. Anyway, we’ll take their word for that.

However, the UCP also admitted Sandhu was there because “Caucus staff regularly attend events of political interest, including the meeting in question.”

“The organizers of this meeting were adamant that the data being used was obtained legally,” the UCP statement continued. “At the time, the staff observing the meeting had no reason to believe the website in question was unlawful.”

Which does beg the question: Were they paying attention? C’mon!

As the NDP pointed out, the video shows that right before the eyes of the 80 participants organizers demonstrated the effectiveness of their database by pulling up the personal information of former UCP premier Jason Kenney — who was run out of office and replaced by Danielle Smith by some of the very people involved in the Centurion Project and has very good reasons not to want them to know his address and phone number. Surely this should have been an indicator something sketchy was afoot even without direct confirmation of the source of the data?

But apparently not, if we are to believe the UCP.

“This video appears to show the database that was built using the unauthorized electors list that was the subject of an injunction issued by the Court of King’s Bench on April 30, 2026,” the author of the NDP release added.

The NDP gave the recording to the RCMP on April 17. Opposition Leader Naheed Nenshi told Kenney about the breach.

Kenney, unsurprisingly, was not pleased. “I understand that my personal information, including my home address, was shared publicly on a screen at a recent Alberta separatist event. It was also recorded on video, and is now circulating,” he said late Tuesday on the social media platform previously known as Twitter.

“This was apparently part of the outrageous data leak of Albertans’ private information, wherein Elections Alberta shared its entire detailed provincial voter database with the ‘Republican Party of Alberta,’ which in turn shared it with some separatist group called the ‘Centurion Project,’ whose leadership then shared my personal information publicly,” Kenney wrote.

“Over the past few years I have received no shortage of threats from people broadly associated with the separatist/antivax/far right movement in Alberta,” Kenney continued. “So it is disturbing that my personal information is now broadly available, particularly in those circles.”

“I will retain legal counsel to seek advice on recourse regarding this outrageous and potentially dangerous violation of my personal privacy,” he concluded.

In the Opposition news release, the NDP asked how Smith could claim, as recently as Monday, “that she only learned of this data breach from police statements on April 29-30, published almost two weeks after this meeting took place?”

Moreover, the NDP asked rhetorically, “Why was it not reported or disclosed by any UCP or any government official to the RCMP and Elections Alberta that the Centurion Project appears to have unauthorized access to the electors list?”

Well, we all understand that we’re unlikely to get answers to questions like that as long as the UCP remains in power — and, if the most recent polling is accurate, that could be a while, maybe even forever if the UCP goes ahead with the Texas-style gerrymandering project it’s been telegraphing.

Weirdly, the UCP statement insisted the NDP should have told the UCP about what it learned from the recording of the April 16 meeting. If nothing else, you have to give them points for chutzpah for that one.

During question period Tuesday in the legislature, Smith stuck to her talking point that she knew nothing about any UCP staffers attending the meeting and only learned about the massive data breach from the media.

This is what is technically known in political science studies as “implausible deniability.”

Longtime observers of Alberta politics will remember the late Rod Love, premier Ralph Klein’s chief of staff, chief political factotum and principal strategist. Say what you will about the Progressive Conservatives in those days, Love would never have let anything this dumb happen, let alone leak out to the public. He must be spinning like a top in his grave that Conservative political strategy has come to this!