Take Back Alberta refusing to co-operate with Elections Alberta investigation
Founder David Parker says he won't provide the names of his donors to Elections Alberta until all of its employees are fired.
Take Back Alberta (TBA) founder David Parker is refusing to cooperate with an Elections Alberta probe into his organization’s activities until the government agency is purged of all its employees, he told supporters at a Jan. 18 “emergency meeting.”
Given the close institutional ties between TBA and Alberta’s ruling United Conservative Party (UCP), and personal ties between Parker and Premier Danielle, things could get a bit messy.
“Take Back Alberta is facing a bit of a crisis,” Parker said over Zoom at the meeting’s outset. “I don't actually see it as that much of a crisis, but it will be perceived by the general public as a crisis.”
This not mad tone permeated Parker’s lengthy diatribe, in which he at one point encouraged his supporters to look into who works for Elections Alberta.
The account of what he’s being accused of is coming from Parker himself, who is not exactly a reliable narrator, with his penchant for conspiracy theorizing. But Elections Alberta has a tendency to be tight-lipped about its investigations until they’re complete, so that’s all we’ve got for now.
“Elections Alberta is unable to comment on allegations that we may or may not have received, or investigations we may or may not be conducting,” Elections Alberta spokesperson Robyn Bell told The Orchard.
Elections Alberta, according to Parker, has received 24 “very minor complaints” from members of the public that the town halls TBA hosted across the province encouraging people to vote for the UCP were a form of illegal, undisclosed election advertising.
According to the Election Finances and Contribution Disclosures Act, election advertising includes “organizing events where a significant purpose of the event is to promote or oppose a registered party or registered candidates.”
Donations to third party advertisers, such as TBA, are supposed to be spent on advertising, but Parker said Elections Alberta has also accused him of enriching himself off of those donations. He claimed he has the receipts to prove this isn’t the case.
While a third party advertiser can advertise in support or against a specific political party or candidate, it’s not permitted to collude with the campaign, which Parker said he’s accused of doing with the UCP.
The notion of a third party advertiser colluding with a party whose board of directors it controls is the “silliest” accusation, according to Parker, noting that TBA was formed specifically to oppose Jason Kenney’s UCP leadership, which seems irrelevant given that the group registered as a third party advertiser on April 23, 2023, at which point Kenney wasn’t even an MLA.
As part of Elections Alberta’s investigation, the government agency wants TBA to provide it with a list of all its financial supporters.
Parker says that’s not happening. “The simple reason for that is that I do not trust Elections Alberta,” he said. “I do not trust the government with information that everyone on this call knows could be released and used to attack people who have supported this movement.”
Declaring Elections Alberta an “enemy of democracy,” Parker said he “will now declare an endless war on Elections Alberta until every person who works there has been fired.”
Maintaining he did nothing wrong, Parker announced that he will nonetheless be disbanding the Take Back Alberta Society, which is officially registered with Elections Alberta as a third-party advertiser and, in a clever-by-half scheme, replace it with a new non-profit called Take Back Alberta, which won’t be registered as a third party advertiser.
That’s the bad news. “But the good news,” he added, “is everyone that currently sits on the board and all of the current captains that are working on setting up meetings for Take Back Alberta are not working for the legal entity that is under investigation.”
The chair of the new, not-under-Elections-Alberta-investigation TBA, Tim Hoven, was at the meeting.
You might remember him as the independent candidate who ran, with TBA’s blessing, against Minister of Seniors, Community and Social Services Jason Nixon after Hoven was disqualified from the UCP nomination race for having an account on Parler, a social media app beloved by neo-Nazis.
Before the event commenced formally, Hoven boasted that he is back in the UCP.
Another familiar name dropped during the event was Leighton Grey, who Parker said has been obtained as TBA’s legal counsel.
In 2020, Grey stepped down from an appointment to the Provincial Court Nominating Committee after the CBC uncovered social media posts in which he compared the COVID vaccine to Auschwitz tattoos and called Black Lives Matter a “leftist lie” promulgated by George Soros.
Sounds exactly like Parker’s kind of guy.
Parker called the investigation an example of “lawfare,” in which the law is used as a political weapon against opponents, but conceded that his group’s practices during the election could have possibly been illegal:
Their goal is to try to discredit Take Back Alberta and the things we've accomplished by smearing it as illegal or breaking the law. Well, I do not care whether they say what we're doing is illegal, because I know that it should not be illegal, whether it is or isn't, to just gather together and talk about politics [emphasis added].
That would, of course, depend on whether that conversation was facilitated by a registered third party advertiser and was centred on how to get a certain political party elected in an upcoming election.
Reminds me of this InternetHippo tweet:
Parker claimed there’s a double standard at play, referring to a complaint from the UCP, which he is totally not colluding with, by the way, alleging that the Alberta Federation of Labour, the Alberta Teachers Association and the Canadian Union of Provincial Employees were colluding with the NDP by advertising during the election.
That never went anywhere, likely because the vague complaint was blatantly partisan in nature and provided no evidence for its suspicions.
But to Parker, who’s accused of everything the UCP accused the unions of doing and more, it’s all part of a grand conspiracy.
Workers at Elections Alberta are represented by the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE), which is itself a registered third-party advertiser. To Parker, that means the workers all have to go in order for them to investigate him fairly. Check mate, libs.
Except Elections Alberta employees aren’t unionized.
“Elections Alberta is an independent, non-partisan office of the Legislative Assembly, and as such, all Elections Alberta employees are opted out and excluded from the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees,” spokesperson Bell told The Orchard.
News that TBA may have run afoul of election law was first reported by PressProgress in a May 16, 2023 story, in which reporter Stephen Magusiak revealed that Benita Pedersen, then a TBA organizer, was training scrutineers for the Alberta election that month.
Under the Elections Act, scrutineers can only be trained by a political party, not a third party. Pedersen, who Parker later purged from TBA for lacking “message discipline,” told attendees to sidle up to UCP candidates and volunteer as their scrutineers. Some might interpret that as a form of collusion.
The following week, Magusiak reported that Elections Alberta was investigating a May 22 TBA-sponsored talk from crackpot (unlicensed) psychologist and right-wing influencer Jordan Peterson as a potentially illegal election event, which Parker appeared to confirm.
At the event, Peterson described NDP Leader Rachel Notley, with whom he grew up in Fairview, Alta., as “resentful and bitter,” and called on attendees to seize control of the province from “political elites.”
“We’re working with [Elections Alberta] on whether or not to categorize it as political advertising,” Parker told PressProgress.
Former TBA CFO Marco Von Hugenbois in November 2023, confirmed to Magusiak that he received a visit from an Elections Alberta investigator to “open the books” on the group’s election spending.
“I think there’s things coming down the line that are going to have consequences for them. Elections Alberta is on the trail,” Van Hugenbois said.
This piece has been updated with comment from Elections Alberta and to reflect the fact that its staff aren’t in fact unionized.