As bad as the release of the personal data of three million Albertans in the province’s list of electors to virtually every fraudster and propagandist in the world turns out to be, it could have been worse!
And it’s only because a public employee had the good sense and courage to stand up to the Alberta’s Conservative government two decades ago that it isn’t.
Back in 2006, soon after Ed Stelmach had replaced Ralph Klein as premier of Alberta, someone in the Progressive Conservative government had the bright idea that the province-wide voters list should also include everybody’s birth date.
“I refused,” Lorne Gibson told me in an email last weekend. “I asked them why they wanted the DOB for voters and the response was that they wanted to ensure that the people on the list were eligible to vote. I told them that was my job and there would be no one on the list that was not 18 years of age or older.”
Readers will recall that from June 2006 to March 2009, Gibson was Alberta’s chief electoral officer. Nine years later, in the spring of 2018, he was hired by Rachel Notley’s NDP government to serve Election Commissioner, the position from which he was fired in 2019 by Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party government for doing his job too independently and effectively with regard to election irregularities in that premier’s own successful leadership campaign.
Casting his mind back to 2006, Gibson remembered: “They said they would change the legislation to require birth dates on the list, so I enlisted the support of the Privacy Commissioner at the time to make the argument that this was not necessary nor was it a good idea in case the voters list ever got lost, stolen or leaked.”
“The government backed off,” he said. “Can you imagine how much worse this situation would be for identity theft if the list also contained birth dates?”
Remember that in 2006 the Internet was not exactly brand new, but social media was just getting started. Facebook had just stopped calling itself “The Face Book” and started letting folks sign up who weren’t university students. Twitter launched that spring. The first iPhone wouldn’t be introduced till the spring of 2007. Online identity theft was only starting to be a thing.
Who knew that the Internet would become the magnet for fraudsters of every stripe it is today? Well, apparently Gibson – who now runs an election consulting business in Manitoba – had an inkling, and it’s a lucky thing for us hapless Albertans that he did.
“The government also passed legislation for my office to provide them with all of the poll books from the elections so they would know who had voted, and when they voted, and who had not,” Gibson added. “I objected to this on privacy grounds but lost this battle.”
“It is my view that political parties, MLAs, prospective candidates, constituency associations, and leadership contestants should not be provided with the list of electors,” he told me.
“This information is collected from voters for the purposes of determining who is eligible to vote in our elections in order to protect the integrity of elections.” Voters who provide their information in good faith have no idea that it will be shared with a wide range of people, some of them pretty shady, he explained.
“The bar for becoming a candidate in an election or the leader of a political party is not set very high,” he observed. “I for one would prefer that my personal information not end up in their hands or the hands of the thousands of volunteers they hire as door-to-door canvassers or scrutineers at the polls.”
The huge breach in Alberta discovered late last month, thought to be the largest leak of personal information in Canadian history, should be a wake-up call for election-management agencies throughout Canada, Gibson argued. After all, data is managed the same way in most jurisdictions, and political parties and their agents that receive the information are not subject most places to privacy legislation or meaningful penalties.
He calls for a full public inquiry into the breach. He argues the inquiry should have “a wide ranging scope to cover not only what happened with this specific data breach but also into the conditions that allowed something like this to happen and the tools that provincial and law enforcement authorities have to deal with this.”
As things stand, Gibson said, Elections Alberta is one of the main actors in this debacle – “after all they provided the data to the Republican Party, they are responsible for safeguarding the privacy of the voter register and list, and they have been given the responsibility for investigating breaches of the elections legislation” – and yet they have now been assigned the responsibility to investigate themselves. “There is something wrong with this picture.”
Once upon a time there was an agency that could do that job, Gibson wrote. That was the Office of the Election Commissioner, which had the power to investigate how Elections Alberta did its job.
“It was not for reasons of cost saving that this agency was eliminated, as the government at the time first stated,” Gibson observed. “Nor was it to make election law enforcement in Alberta more consistent with the way it was enforced in other provinces and territories, as they later stated.”
No, it was all about making sure no one pulled back the curtain on how a certain political party was operating. Now Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP 2.0 has gone even further to make it all but impossible to investigate election jiggery-pokery.
