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Separatist leader Mitch Sylvestre during a rally in front of the Elections Alberta headquarters in Edmonton on Monday.HENRY MARKEN/AFP/Getty Images
The scandal isn’t what’s illegal. The scandal is what’s legal. – Michael Kinsley
What is so scandalous about a separatist group getting its hands on the Alberta voter list, including the names, addresses and phone numbers of nearly three million of the province’s citizens?
Is it that the list appears to have been illegally obtained, and passed on to the fringy Centurion Project by the equally fringy Republican Party of Alberta, part of the same network of cranks and activist groups agitating for a referendum on secession but – unlike the Centurion Project – a registered political party?
Well, no. That’s a scandal, all right. But it’s not the most scandalous part of this affair. Not by a long shot.
All right. Is the scandal that the group posted it online, where it could be downloaded by bad actors of every conceivable persuasion: from stalkers and fraud artists to Russian disinformation operators? Is it that the list remained accessible for close to a month, though Elections Alberta had been advised of the breach, owing to the inability or unwillingness of the agency to investigate?
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Is it that the separatists may have obtained the requisite number of signatures to trigger the referendum by means of this apparently illegally obtained data? That they may even have used it to inflate the number of signatures?
No, no, no and no. Again, these are all scandals in their own right. But they’re not the scandal.
Very well. Is the scandal that anyone outside Elections Alberta has access to the voting list, including the political parties? They don’t actually need them, you understand. It’s perfectly possible to communicate with large numbers of people without knowing their names, addresses and phone numbers, let alone all the other personal information the parties collect, in the service of assembling those detailed individual profiles with which they attempt to manipulate, inflame and bamboozle the voter.
Or is the scandal the cavalier way in which the parties handle this sensitive data, in defiance of provincial and federal privacy laws? That is to say, it would be in defiance of these laws, had the parties not universally agreed to exempt themselves from them. (The sole exception: B.C.)
You’re getting warmer. But you still haven’t put your finger on the real scandal in this whole business.
Why are we here, after all? Because a small and unrepresentative group of extremists took over the governing United Conservative Party, forcing out one leader and installing another, more sympathetic to their aims.
It is that party, and that leader, that slashed the number of signatures needed to trigger a constitutional referendum under the province’s Citizen Initiative Act – from 20 per cent of eligible voters to 10 per cent of the votes cast in the last provincial election, or from about 588,000 to about 178,000.
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That is why the province, and the country, could soon be convulsed with a referendum hardly anyone wants, on a subject that is beyond the jurisdiction of Albertans to decide.
The scandal, that is, is that the referendum might be held at all – that it is possible to hold such a referendum.
Or no, the scandal is that anyone, inside Alberta or out, pays any attention to what is, after all, a glorified opinion poll.
The scandal – which long predates the present farce – is that we ever allowed the idea to take root that the fate of the entire country could be decided by the vote of half the population in one province – that a bunch of people could help themselves to the territory of Canada, merely by holding a vote on it. Or, even worse, could threaten to do so, not because that is what they sincerely desired, but as a means of blackmailing their fellow Canadians.
Sorry, did I say that was the scandal? No, the scandal is that because of this abject policy of national self-negation, this willingness to legitimize the illegitimate, to tolerate what is intolerable under the constitutions of virtually every other democratic country on Earth, we now face the prospect of secession referendums in not one but two provinces, Alberta and Quebec (for the third time!), more or less simultaneously.
No, that hasn’t quite got it. Ordinarily, that would be a scandal on a level never seen before or elsewhere. But to engage in all this self-destructive nonsense at the precise moment when the President of the United States is threatening to annex the country, backed by overtures to the separatists in at least one province as part of an explicit divide-and-conquer strategy – I don’t think scandal is even the word.
