Public appointees to Alberta university boards have donated $107K to the UCP
They've contributed little more than $2K to the NDP, by way of contrast.
Sitting public appointees to Alberta university boards of governors have donated nearly $107,000 combined to the ruling UCP since 2019, according to an analysis of Elections Alberta financial disclosures.
These appointees include a former Cabinet minister who lost his seat in the last provincial election, a former staffer for the premier, the party caucus’s past executive director and the chair of the 2022 UCP leadership race committee.
The provincial government is able to appoint a chair and as many members as it wants to a public university’s board of governors, via order in council, who serve alongside a maximum of nine members nominated by the university.
Under the Post-Secondary Learning Act, these boards have a sweeping mandate of overseeing the “management, government and control of the university buildings and land.”
These are volunteer roles, but the prestige that comes with them, and their ability to help pad a resume for future money-making opportunities, shouldn’t be understated.
The Orchard cross-referenced the names of the government’s current appointees to university boards with Elections Alberta financial disclosures dating back to 2019 — the year of the first provincial election featuring the UCP.
According to this analysis, appointees made $108,977 in political donations, with $106,757 to the UCP and $2,220 to the NDP, meaning that 98 per cent of appointees’ donations went to the party which appointed them.
There were 23 people who made political donations appointed to a board of governors, 21 of whom donated to the UCP, making the average donation of UCP donors $5,084.
With 75 public appointees to the boards of Alberta’s seven public universities, that means that more than one in four have donated to the UCP.
The only one of Alberta’s seven public universities without any appointees that have donated money to the UCP is Alberta University of the Arts.
The University of Alberta was the university whose public appointees donated the most to the UCP with $44,948, followed by University of Calgary with $37,580 and Athabasca University with $13,188.
The top UCP donor sitting on a university board is a familiar face.
Jason Copping, who previously served as labour minister and health minister before his defeat in the 2023 election, was appointed to the UCalgary board of governors in December 2025, which received no press attention.
He’s given a total of $11,229 to the party he represented in the legislature.
Other nakedly partisan appointments include Premier Danielle Smith’s former director of policy co-ordination Ryan Hastman ($7,278), former UCP caucus executive director Brittany Baltimore ($5,174) and former chair of the UCP Leadership Race Committee David Price ($2,999), who were appointed to the UAlberta, Grant MacEwan University and UCalgary boards, respectively.
The two Alberta NDP donor appointees are Martin Kennedy, who joined MacEwan’s board in June 2024 and made a $500 donation to the NDP in 2023, and Darcy Gonci, who’s been a board member at the University of Lethbridge since 2020 and has donated a total of $1,720 to the Alberta NDP in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Lisa Young, a political scientist at UCalgary who has previously worked in administration, told The Orchard that the mandate of public appointees to university boards is “tricky.”
While a board of governors has a fiduciary duty to put the best interests of the university first, explained Young, the government will seek to appoint board members to “steer the institution in a direction the government wants.”
“When the best interests of the university and the government’s direction don’t overlap, government appointed board members might find themselves in a challenging situation,” she said.
Young added that university boards appear to have likely made a “strategic choice” to avoid “conflict with the provincial government” since the UCP government purged Athabasca University’s board in October 2022 of members who criticized plans for increasing the online university’s physical presence in Athabasca.
Below are the six universities with UCP donor appointees, ranked by the amount of money donated to the ruling party, with brief bios including the donation history of each relevant appointee.
University of Alberta ($44.9K)
Rob Seidel ($11,175)
Seidel, a corporate lawyer, was appointed to the UAlberta board of governors in June 2024. He previously served on the Grant MacEwan University board from 2002 to 2008, co-chairing the fundraising committee to build MacEwan’s new School of Business.
Seidel is the former chair of Alberta Innovates Health Solution, a now-defunct Crown corporation that subsidized private sector health-care research, and served on former premier Jim Prentice’s transition team after he won the 2014 PC leadership race.
He donated $2,625 to the UCP in 2026, $3,450 in 2025, $2,625 in 2024 and $1,875 in 2023, in addition to a $600 contribution to the party’s Lac Ste. Anne-Parkland constituency association in 2020.
Darren Durstling ($9,750)
Durstling, who was appointed to the board in June 2024, owns ONE Properties, a real estate investment firm with properties in Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto.
He contributed $2,625 to the UCP in each of 2024, 2025 and 2026, as well as $1,875 in 2023.
Brad Ferguson ($7,875)
Ferguson was appointed to chair UAlberta’s board of governors in April 2026. He’s a senior VP and Western Canadian market lead for management consulting firm Optimus SBR.
From 2021 to 2022, he was an assistant deputy minister for the Alberta government’s Environmental, Social and Governance Secretariat.
Ferguson served as the president and CEO of the Edmonton Economic Development Corporation from 2012 to 2018.
He donated $2,625 to the UCP in each of 2024, 2025 and 2026.
Ryan Hastman ($7,278)
Hastman, the corporate director of strategic partnerships at Covenant Health, was appointed to the UAlberta board in June 2024.
He has deep ties to federal and provincial conservative politics, and used to be friend of the newsletter Dave Cournoyer’s right-wing foil on the Daveberta podcast.
Hastman served as Premier Danielle Smith’s director of policy co-ordination for her first few months as premier.
He worked as Minister of Advanced Education Rajan Sawhney’s chief of staff from 2021 to 2022, when she was transportation minister, and 2019 to 2020 when she was community and social services minister, and served as the deputy director of government caucus in between.
Hastman was the only Conservative candidate to lose in Alberta in the 2011 federal election, when ran against NDP incumbent Linda Duncan in Edmonton-Strathcona.
He was a senior special assistant to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff Guy Giorno from December 2008 to April 2009, and before that was a spokesperson for Public Safety Canada under ministers Stockwell Day and Peter Van Loan.
But Hastman also has experience at UAlberta, where he worked in various director roles from 2012 to 2019.
He’s given a total of $7,278 to the UCP, consisting of $1,413 in 2025, $399 in 2022, $2,026 in 2021, $3,100 in 2020 and $340 in 2019.
Venkata Vemana ($5,795)
Appointed in March 2024, Vemana is an engineer with the Veracity Engineering and Risk Consulting Services. From 2016 to 2023, he worked on the first phase of the Valley Line LRT expansion for TransEd.
He’s contributed a total of $5,795 to the UCP and its Calgary-Edgemont constituency association from 2019 to this year. This includes combined donations of $263 in 2026, $2,500 in 2025, $1,000 in 2023, $684 in 2022, $761 in 2021, $288 in 2020 and $300 in 2019.
Diane Wheatley ($1,575)
Wheatley, the chief administrative officer of talent acquisition firm Humanis Advisory Group, was appointed to the UAlberta board in June 2024. She also sits on the board of the Veterinary Information Network, an online community for veterinarians based in Davis, California.
She donated $1,050 to the UCP in 2025 and $525 in 2024.
Miles Safranovich ($1,500)
Since 2009, Safranovich has served as an executive at Nuna Logistics, a mining and heavy civil contractor that is 51% owned by the Kitikmeot Inuit Association and 49% owned by the North American Construction Group. He was appointed to the UAlberta board in June 2024.
He donated $500 to the UCP in 2025 and $1,000 in 2024.
University of Calgary ($37.6K)
Jason Copping ($11,229)
Copping was first elected as the UCP MLA for Calgary-Varsity in the 2019 provincial election, serving a single term before his defeat by NDP MLA Dr. Luanne Metz.
He was former premier Jason Kenney’s inaugural labour and immigration minister from 2019 to 2021, when he was appointed minister of health.
Since leaving politics, Copping has started his own consultancy firm, in addition to serving as a special advisor to corporate law firm Blue Rock Law and strategic advisor to Compliance Health Technologies, which is building an AI model for health-care training, credentialing and compliance monitoring.
His donations span the party, his former constituency association in Calgary-Varsity and small donations to the Grande Prairie-Wapiti and Calgary-Beddington constituency associations.
Copping donated $638 to the UCP in 2025, $375 in 2024, $375 in 2023, $4,243 in 2021, $3,200 in 2020 and $2,398 in 2019.
Aleem Dhanani ($9,813)
Dhanani is a realtor and developer with Bri-More Developments who was appointed to the UCalgary board in 2022.
In 2025, he donated $3,750 to the UCP and donated $3,450 in 2024. In 2021, Dhanani donated $150 to the Calgary-Bow constituency association, the riding represented by then-advanced educator minister Demetrios Nicolaides, and another $150 to the party. He contributed $2,313 to the UCP in 2019.
Steven Major ($9,476)
Major, a corporate lawyer, is a senior partner at Bennett Jones, the law firm that employs former premier Jason Kenney as an advisor, and sits on the board of Enserva, an energy services sector advocacy group.
He’s the former president of the Canadian Bar Association and past chair of the Canadian Energy Executive Association.
Major donated $1,875 to the UCP this year and another $1,875 in 2025.
In 2024, he contributed $2,500 to the ruling party and gave $3,226 in 2023.
William Sembo ($3,288)
Sembo, who works for global financial services company Lazard, was appointed chair of the UCalgary board of governors in May 2026.
He previously chaired the Strategic Advisory Board of the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases and served as the vice-chair of the Dean’s Advisory Board at the Cumming School of Medicine, both at UCalgary.
In 2025, he donated $3,288 to the UCP.
David Price ($2,999)
Price, an employment lawyer at Bennett Jones, was appointed to the UCalgary board in 2023 after serving as a senator for the university for two years.
In 2022, Price served as the chair of the UCP Leadership Race Committee. From 2024 to 2025, he chaired the Alberta Court of King’s Bench Applications Judge Recruitment Panel.
He also sat on the interim policy and bylaw committee for the newly formed UCP from 2017 to 2018, and prior to PC and Wildrose’s merger was the secretary of the Wildrose board and president of the Calgary-Foothills Wildrose constituency association.
Price donated $2,324 to the UCP in 2024, $375 in 2023 and $300 in 2022.
Karan Dutt ($400)
Appointed in June 2024, Dutt is a senior engineer with MEG Energy who previously worked as an engineer for the Alberta Energy Regulator.
The same year of his appointment to the UCalgary board, Dutt donated $400 to the UCP.
Jeff Davison ($375)
Davison was a one-term Calgary city councillor who served from 2017 to 2021 and unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2021 and 2025. He now works for LMNO Consulting
During his stint on council, Davison was perhaps best known as an enthusiastic advocate for dedicating public funds to building a new hockey arena to replace the aging Saddledome.
In his most recent mayoral campaign, Davison pledged to repeal blanket zoning, eliminate residential parking fees and freeze property taxes for four years “to restore fiscal discipline.”
He was appointed to the UCalgary board in March 2026. In 2025, Davison gave $375 to the UCP.
Athabasca University ($13.2K)
Lori Van Rooijen ($10,188)
Van Rooijen was one of the board members appointed after the UCP purged Athabasca’s board in October 2022.
She also chairs the board of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum and previously chaired the Alberta Jubilee Auditorium Society board.
Van Rooijen, a founding partner with the development firm Larkspur Projects, donated $3,750 to the UCP this year, $3,938 in 2025, $500 in 2024 and $2,000 in 2020.
Leo de Bever ($3,000)
Also appointed in the October 2022 shakeup of the board, de Bever is a senior fellow at the CD Howe Institute think tank and has previously served as the CEO of AIMCo.
He made a $3,000 contribution to the UCP in 2019.
Grant MacEwan University ($5.2K)
Brittany Baltimore ($5,174)
Baltimore, who was appointed to the MacEwan board in June 2024, worked as Labour and Immigration Minister Jason Copping’s press secretary, the UCP deputy director and party executive director between 2019 to 2021.
She now works as the director of engagement for insurance company Alberta Blue Cross.
In 2021, Baltimore donated $1,389 to the UCP, $25 to the Lethbridge-East constituency association, $500 to the Strathcona-Sherwood Park constituency association and $210 to the West Yellowhead constituency association. In 2020, she contributed $3,050 to the party.
Mount Royal University ($5K)
Dexter Nelson ($3,100)
Nelson owns Horsetrack Ranche in Carseland, a hamlet 68 km southeast of Calgary. An athletic therapist by trade, he serves as the president of Sport Medicine Council of Alberta.
Nelson is the former department chair of MRU’s Physical Education and Recreation Studies. He was appointed to the Mount Royal board of governors in November 2024.
In 2025, he contributed $3,100 to the UCP.
Tracey Bodnarchuk ($1,539)
Bodnarchuk is the CEO of Canada Powered by Women, an advocacy group for women in the energy industry, and is a principal with TAB Consulting Group. She’s previously worked for KPMG Canada, Norton Rose Fulbright, Suncor Energy, KPMG and Deloitte.
She was appointed to the MRU board in May 2026.
Bodnarchuk donated $445 to the UCP in 2025, $500 in 2024 and $594 in 2023.
Steven McLeod ($349)
McLeod, who was appointed to the board in May 2026, is a data analyst with Tourmaline Oil. He previously served on Bow Valley College’s board of governors.
In 2022, McLeod donated $349 to the UCP.
University of Lethbridge ($879)
William Chapman ($879)
Appointed to the board in February 2024, Chapman has been a Coaldale town councillor since 2007. He’s also the president of the Highway 3 Twinning Development Association.
Chapman donated $288 to the UCP in 2023, $253 to the Taber-Warner constituency association in 2021 and $338 to Taber-Warner in 2020.