Gregory Hartzler, a financial consultant to the Alberta Prosperity Project, attended the gathering and recalled the American attendees as affable fellows in casual clothes. “They could have gone and played nine – they would have been perfectly fine.”
David Parker, an organizer for Alberta separation, brokered the meeting and championed the software. Known as 10X Votes, it mines voter lists to identify communities of like-minded people that could be mobilized to potentially swing elections.
“I was blown away by what this can do,” Mr. Parker told a separatist meeting in Edmonton in April, according to video footage of the presentation, where he demonstrated a version adapted for use in Alberta. He called it “the most effective way I have ever come across to win a campaign.”
His movement needed a boost. The separatist cause has never made a sustained push past 30 per cent support.
For Mr. Parker, the software was the path to victory – one that ultimately resulted in a massive privacy breach involving the sensitive personal data of nearly three
million Albertans. The breach raised alarms inside Canada’s security agencies, according to a classified document obtained by The Globe and Mail.
But Mr. Parker’s embrace of the Michigan delegation is evidence of something else – a pattern: separatist factions in Alberta eager to engage the U.S. in their plans for secession, and American actors willing to assist, either privately or openly.
A Globe and Mail investigation has found that Republican political operatives were on the ground in Alberta this year to assist the separatist campaign in its bid to leave Canada, while harbouring their own aspirations for the
province to secede.
The Globe also found that when Alberta separatist leaders went to Washington to meet with the U.S. State department, they offered up key assets from the province’s
resource portfolio, including access to fresh water and royalties on crude oil, in exchange for help transitioning to independence.
Through interviews with The Globe on both sides of the border, people involved in politics, the corporate sector and Alberta’s pursuit of separatism have described persistent efforts by figures in the U.S. administration and conservative political establishment to support groups seeking American expansionism and independence for Alberta.
A series of overtures
The separatists arrived in Washington, D.C., last year armed with a determination to leave Canada and a raft of ideas for how an independent Alberta could instead interlace its future fortunes with the United States.
New oil pipelines could be built to the Pacific that would travel through Washington state, evading the politically hostile terrain of British Columbia. The loonie holdings of Albertans could be converted at par into American greenbacks, perhaps paid for by offering the U.S. a royalty on Alberta crude, or even a slice of Alberta’s land for a railroad to Alaska. Other repayment deals could
be struck with the White House by offering Alberta resources in agriculture, forestry, mining and precious metals.
An independent Alberta could even offer fresh water to the U.S., Dennis Modry, a former Alberta heart surgeon who is co-founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project, said in an interview. “We just brought up water as a possible issue. Does the U.S. need more water? Can Alberta provide some more water to them?” said Dr. Modry.
In Washington, the Trump administration has quietly displayed detailed knowledge of Canadian secessionist history, indicating an interest in the outcome of the referendum Oct. 19, in which Albertans will decide whether to pursue independence.
At the same time, Alberta sovereignty has become a talking point for senior American leaders and influential conservative voices, giving legitimacy to a separatist cause that might otherwise have been a fringe provincial movement.
Among those U.S. voices are Drew Born and Drew Wierda, the Michigan-based founders of 10X Votes, whose families are well known Republican royalty.
Mr. Wierda was one of the representatives in the meeting in Calgary
In January, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described a “wealth of natural resources” in Alberta, which he said had been trapped by domestic opposition to a Pacific pipeline.
