Danielle Smith and her United Conservative Party can’t be too happy today with Elections Alberta and its boss, Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure. 

On Wednesday, Court of King’s Bench Justice Shaina Leonard ruled that Mr. McClure made an error in law when he approved a Citizen Initiative petition collected by a group seeking a referendum on Alberta independence from Canada. 

And yesterday, Mr. McClure said he accepted the court’s ruling overturning his decision, the CBC reported. The boxes containing reams of petition forms collected by the Stay Free Alberta/Alberta Prosperity Project campaign will remain in secure storage and Elections Alberta staff won’t count them, maybe for a while, maybe forever. 

For those of you interested in what Justice Leonard actually said, you can get a sense of it in a few lines of her conclusion, although I’ve left out a lot because we don’t have all day here. “I conclude that the CEO Decision triggers a duty to consult,” she wrote. “The Crown has actual knowledge of Treaty rights that are engaged by the Second Proposal. The CEO Decision triggers a binding referendum on secession. Because of the sequence of events that are triggered by the CEO Decision, the CEO Decision constitutes Crown conduct. A requirement to implement secession without prior involvement of the Applicants has the potential to adversely affect Treaty rights. The CEO Decision therefore triggers a duty to consult.”*

Ergo, she ruled, Mr. McClure’s decision to approve the petition was an error in law rendering it unreasonable, and, moreover, the government failed in its duty to consult with First Nations.

Now, you might think I was going to suggest that the UCP and Premier Danielle Smith would be upset at Mr. McClure for making an error in law. But that’s not it at all. Like other utopian ideological governments of its ilk, the UCP forgives incompetence and values errors that work in its favour.

But Ms. Smith and her separatist henchpersons will undoubtedly perceive Mr. McClure’s honourable recognition and public acceptance of the judge’s ruling as a betrayal. After all, it obviously undermines the government’s weak case that judge’s decision is an outrage against democracy that must be remedied, if not by appeal then by an arbitrary act of cabinet. 

Add to that the fact that late Wednesday, Dallas Stoesz, the deputy chief electoral officer, admitted on a CBC political program that the largest breach of personal data in Canadian history** is not only still in the wind, but that the 568 folks who received cease-and-desist letters about using the breached data barely scratches the surface of the extent of the data dump. 

“I want to really stress that it’s thousands who may have just seen the list,” Ms. Stoesz told the CBC in an interview. “What we don’t know is exactly who and how many people received the list and had direct access to the full list of electors.”

And what’s more, it’s a near certainty we never will. 

As everyone in Canada now knows, along with basically every electronic fraudster on the planet, the purloined database includes full names, addresses and phone numbers of 2.9 million Albertans. So keep a sharp eye on your electronic banking records, folks.

What we know about the mechanics of the leak, theft, misappropriation or whatever the breach was is limited in significant ways – and anyone who does know is not likely to want to fill in the blanks.

We do know the data was legally given by Elections Alberta to the so-called Republican Party of Alberta, headed by Cameron Davies, a prominent separatist who has also been active in UCP circles. Elections Alberta said it determined this by identifying fake names it included only in the version of that list given to the RPA.

And we know it ended up in the hands of a political campaign company called the Centurion Project, which is apparently not legally entitled to have access to it and which is run by David Parker, another prominent separatist who has also been active in UCP circles. Earlier this week, Elections Alberta said Mr. Parker isn’t co-operating with its investigation,

But while it is easy to speculate idly on what might have happened on the short trip between Point A and Point B, and whose hands the data may have passed through or why, no one who knows is talking about it and our government is quite happy to leave it that way. The RCMP have already advised us to forget about asking them any questions about their investigations. 

So Ms. Stoesz’s admission that things are actually considerably worse than they appeared to be when the catastrophe was first revealed will doubtless be seen as another outrage by the UCP as well. 

As for Mr. McClure, who has a quarter century history in various government positions and education in fine arts and architecture, the government has already turned down his request for a modest raise. That’s probably a sign of things to come. 

Words of wisdom from Tyler Shanro!

Words of wisdom from Tyler Shandro, former senior cabinet minister in Jason Kenney’s UCP government and, briefly, Ms. Smith’s? Seriously? Who saw that coming?

“Nothing in Justice Leonard’s decision prohibits separatists from running a separatist party with a separatist platform in the next general election,” Mr. Shandro tweeted yesterday morning. “Democracy lives through long established processes for democratic participation. Why won’t separatists run on a separatist platform in a general election?”

I think we all understand why, as Mr. Shandro surely does as well. This suggests to me, though, that the right-wing coalition Mr. Kenney stitched together and Ms. Smith has managed to hold together is starting to fray. The question is, can it come apart fast enough to save us from some really dangerous insanity?

*This is one of two significant related decisions rendered by Justice Leonard on Wednesday. The other is found here. We’re all going to need to dig deeply into both these cases. That’s our homework. In the meantime, though, we need to consider the immediate political implications of her rulings. 

**I think it’s safe to state this conclusion outright now without further qualification. It’s been reported as a possibility hundreds of times in the past few hours and no one has stepped forward to say, nope, there was an even bigger one. If that were so, it already would have been identified. Tell me I’m wrong!