Sarah Mills: We came so close to the zipper merge
Three block of two lanes of traffic merging one by one, with everyone inching forward. It was the zipper merge in action...
EDMONTON — Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is criticizing the Opposition NDP for not telling her about a massive privacy breach involving a website after the site was demonstrated during a meeting attended by one of her caucus staffers.
In a fiery chamber debate Wednesday, Smith insisted the United Conservative Party caucus staffer didn’t realize a database shown at the virtual meeting three weeks ago involved a privacy breach with the personal information of nearly three million Alberta voters.
That meeting took place April 16, and the NDP has said it reported it to the RCMP the following day.
But the NDP didn’t tell her government, which Smith is claiming put the legislative assembly at risk.
The meeting and the UCP caucus staffer’s attendance were made public by the NDP on Tuesday, and comes after investigations were launched into a website made by a separatist group called the Centurion Project.
The website featured a publicly accessible database that Elections Alberta says it traced back to an official voter list it had supplied to the pro-independence Republican Party of Alberta. Such lists are only distributed to political parties and elected officials and must not be shared with third parties.
Smith has said she only learned about the breach through media reports last week, but the UCP staffer’s attendance at the April 16 Centurion Project meeting has led NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi to question whether that was true.
Smith said she only learned about the meeting — during which Centurion Project leader David Parker demonstrated how the database worked by searching former premier Jason Kenney’s name and displayed his home address — when the NDP brought it up. The premier has denied accusations that she knew about the breach sooner.
Smith on Wednesday tried to turn the tables on Nenshi, arguing that it was the NDP’s responsibility to have informed the government, not just notify police when it became aware of the breach after the April 16 meeting.
“Why didn’t he tell the members of this legislature? Why didn’t he tell the government?”
“The member opposite should be ashamed of himself. People are sick of his antics.”
Smith said that the staffer, which the NDP has identified as the UCP caucus’s director of stakeholder relations, Arundeep Sandhu, regularly does research for caucus but she insisted that there was no way he could’ve known it was an official voter list from Elections Alberta that he was being shown.
“That was not disclosed on the call,” she said.
Sandhu did not respond to a request for comment.
Nenshi questioned how it was possible that Sandhu watched as Kenney’s home address was shared and did not become concerned. Kenney has said he is hiring a lawyer for advice on what to do following the breach.
“It’s just business as usual for this government to dox a former premier and put him at risk,” Nenshi said.
“That means the premier has created an office culture where it’s either OK to be incompetent and not know that’s a problem or to be so deeply unethical and not care.”
Smith responded by saying it was unethical that Nenshi didn’t tell the assembly what he knew sooner.
“Every single person in this chamber had reason to be interested in that information, reason to want to know, and the member kept it secret.”
Nenshi responded: “In the premier’s world, calling the cops is keeping it secret.”
Asked later by reporters why he hadn’t told other members of the assembly sooner, Nenshi pointed to past close ties between the premier and Parker, the Centurion Project leader.
Parker is best known for organizing a grassroots movement called Take Back Alberta, which helped organize UCP members in casting ballots to unseat Kenney in a confidence vote, and galvanize support to help Smith take Kenney’s place.
Smith also attended Parker’s wedding.
The two had a falling out two years ago, but Nenshi accused the government of being “embedded with the separatists” and was worried they would tip off the separatist group to get ahead of a police investigation.
“As I’ve said many times, if you suspect your neighbour is a thief and you call the cops, you don’t call your neighbour and say the cops are on the way.”
The Centurion Project’s app was shut down last week after Elections Alberta went to court for an injunction.
The group has said it had obtained the data from an unnamed third party and that it would comply with the Elections Alberta investigation. Parker has said the goal was to recruit and identify as many separatist supporters as possible ahead of an expected fall referendum.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 6, 2026.
Jack Farrell and Lisa Johnson, The Canadian Press
