There may have been some light voter fraud in the 2017 UCP leadership race
But not enough for the RCMP to do anything about it seven years later.
2,323 days.
That’s the amount of time that’s elapsed since Jason Kenney resoundingly won the UCP leadership race on Oct. 28, 2017 under a shroud of suspicion that’s resulted in $200,000 in fines from Elections Alberta and a criminal investigation.
It’s also the amount of time it took for the Alberta RCMP to invite reporters out to their K Division headquarters in Edmonton on March 8, 2024 for a much-hyped update to a “high-profile investigation.”
Contrary to progressives’ most feverish fantasies of Kenney, or anyone in his inner circle, doing a perp walk, the Mounties announced that they won’t be laying a single criminal charge against anyone involved in the 2017 leadership race.
Why not issue a press release and let people move on with their lives?
“We do not normally speak to an investigation unless charges have been laid,” Supt. Rick Jané, who oversaw the investigation, said at the news conference’s outset, about an hour after it was scheduled to commence.
“The decision to do that in this rare case is because of the importance of this issue to all Albertans, and then the amount of coverage and questions we do not want people to be left with a picture that is inaccurate.”
At question were two allegations of fraud.
Jeff Callaway, a past president of the Wildrose Party who ran for the UCP leadership as an attack dog for Kenney against former Wildrose leader Brian Jean, solicited donations for his campaign under the false pretence that he was running an independent campaign, violating sec. 380 of the Criminal Code.
Kenney’s leadership campaign created fake emails to intercept new members’ voting PINs and cast votes on their behalf for Kenney without their knowledge, violating sec. 403 of the Criminal Code, which concerns identity fraud.
Jané said the RCMP was unable to determine that a crime was committed in either case, but there’s a catch.
“Following our comprehensive investigation into voter identity fraud,” that being the second allegation, the Mounties “determined that there were suspected instances of potential fraud, however, there was insufficient evidence to charge any suspect [emphasis added],” Jané noted.
He emphasized that the Mounties coordinated with Crown prosecutors — not just conservative ones in Alberta, but conservative ones in Ontario recommended by Doug Ford attorney general Doug Downey — who agreed that there was nothing to see here.
“It's important to say nothing in the investigation suggested that the UCP failed to take reasonable steps to manage their internal process,” Jané said immediately before contradicting himself: “We hope that the information shared today will further reduce the risk of similar incidents occurring in the future for any political party.”
If there were no additional reasonable steps the UCP could have taken to make their election more secure, what possible lessons are there for them to learn?
It didn’t help the Mounties’ case for not pressing charges that Jané couldn’t get a crucial, basic fact straight in his truncated timeline of events after he explained why the news conference was happening at all.
“Allegations of wrongdoing surfaced after the leadership contest [emphasis added],” said Jané.
Nope.
The day Callaway dropped out of the UCP leadership race and promptly endorsed Kenney, Oct. 4, 2017, Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt speculated to Global News that there was something off about the Callaway campaign.
“At both the Calgary and Edmonton debate, Callaway launched attacks against Brian Jean. He has done his job. And now to ensure that he doesn’t get any votes, Callaway is dropping out of the race,” Bratt said.
Allegations of PIN impropriety in the leadership race were made on the first day of voting — Oct. 26 — by Kenney leadership rivals Jean and Doug Schweitzer, who called for the voting to be postponed in a joint submission to party leadership.
Schweitzer centred his allegations on the Kenney campaign’s use of VPN software in their voting kiosks.
“Secret use of software to falsify the sender’s IP address, expressly designed for the purpose of evading detection, is an obvious badge of suspicious behaviour,” his campaign wrote in an additional Oct. 27 submission to the party.
These concerns were quickly forgotten once Kenney won the leadership race. Jean temporarily left politics, returning for some sweet revenge in late 2021, and Schweitzer wasn’t going to let some concerns about the integrity of the party voting process get in the way of the Calgary-Elbow UCP candidate nomination.
Perhaps I’m splitting hairs, but I find it remarkable that a police force, which employed 65 investigators, interviewed 1,200 UCP voters, made 12 trips out of Alberta and banked $460,877 in overtime and travel expenses for this investigation, couldn’t get the case’s basic chronology right.
Jané took great pains at the press conference to say that, even if there was voter fraud, it wouldn’t have made a difference in the race’s outcome.
For its investigation into the identity fraud allegations, the superintendent said, the Mounties obtained the UCP’s voter database for more than 60,000 voters, from which they “identified several suspicious cross sections of votes where multiple votes were cast, using the same phone number or originating from the same IP … address.”
Of these, just 200 were deemed to be potentially fraudulent, which Jané emphasized wouldn’t have impacted Kenney’s margin of victory — an offhand, tacit admission of the political calculations behind the investigation’s outcome.
If you recall, Schweitzer alleged Kenney’s campaign was using a VPN to obscure the actual IP addresses of his votes. If the RCMP considered that possibility, it wasn’t mentioned at their press conference.
But even if we accept that just 200 people were potentially victims of identity fraud, that’s 200 people who deserve justice.
And many of them, independent investigative journalist Charles Rusnell noted on Twitter, were recent immigrants to Canada, making them particularly vulnerable to scammers.
When the CBC reported that there were people who signed up to join the UCP, but never received a voting PIN, despite being listed as having voted, they needed a Punjabi interpreter.
One person who signed his entire family up to join the UCP when asked by Kenney’s campaign said he did so as a “gesture of respect.”
"They know that most people in our community, like my parents, who have a language barrier, are not going to log into a computer and vote," he said.
There was no question Kenney would have won the leadership race, regardless of whether he cheated or not. He had the name recognition, the resumé and an uninterrupted string of electoral wins going back to 1997.
So why did he do it? This was a question I grappled with while writing Kenneyism: Jason Kenney’s Pursuit of Power, which you should buy
I think, ultimately, it wasn’t enough for Kenney to win the leadership race. He needed to crush and humiliate Brian Jean, demonstrating that it was Kenney who was calling the shots in Alberta’s conservative movement from then on.
This was rooted in the assumption that Jean, as a proxy for the rural Alberta conservative base, didn’t know what he was doing. Only Kenney, with his experience at the cabinet table in Ottawa, could remove the loathed NDP from power and settle the score with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
It was precisely this arrogant attitude, inseparable from the hollowness of his authoritarian populist pitch, that ultimately brought about Kenney’s political downfall, providing the closest thing to accountability Kenney has ever seen in his life.
It was never going to be the RCMP who did that.
I feel the RCMP don't want to be bothered laying charges. They certainly have taken a very long time and spent a lot of money investigating this alleged fraud. Why not compete the job? Lay charges and let those charged defend themselves. This whole thing in smelly and now the RCMP are also tainted.