![YourAnonCentral's tweet photo. The Centurion Project's voter surveillance tool was built by US political operatives with direct ties to the Trump regime. #abpoli #ableg #cdnpoli
The data on 2.9 million Albertans was loaded onto an app built with US funding, shaped by US political strategists, and deployed by a Canadian separatist organizer who spent nearly two years cultivating US partners before launching the Centurion Project. The question is not whether there is a US connection to what lawyers have called potentially the most significant privacy breach in Canadian history. The question is how deep the operation goes, who in the Trump orbit knew about it, and how far are they willing to take it.
On the night of 29 April 2026, David Parker stood in front of supporters at the Edmonton Oilfield Technical Society and unveiled the Centurion Project app, describing the technology as the same tool that "helped Trump win Michigan." Minutes after Parker finished speaking, an Elections Alberta investigator arrived with Edmonton police officers to inform organisers they were under investigation for improperly accessing and using the province's list of electors. Parker had already loaded the names, addresses, and voter identification numbers of every judge, every lawyer, every politician, every domestic abuse victim, every First Nations chief, every journalist, every senator, and every elections investigator in the province onto that app. Former premier Jason Kenney, on learning his home address had been shown to meeting participants, retained legal counsel and said he had previously received threats from people involved with the separatist, anti-vaccine, and far-right movements in Alberta. The database was accessible to anyone with the link, with no identity verification required.
Parker is a former Harper PMO staffer and the founder of Take Back Alberta, the political machinery credited with installing Danielle Smith as leader of the United Conservative Party. Smith attended Parker's wedding in 2023. UCP caucus staff attended an online Centurion Project meeting in April 2026, though the UCP says staff believed the data being presented had been legally obtained. Smith says she learned about the breach through media reports.
Elections Alberta confirmed the list came from the Republican Party of Alberta, a registered provincial party that advocates for independence, which had lawful access to the data. Investigators use fictitious "salt" names seeded into lists distributed to parties to identify the source of any leaked copy. Those salt names appeared in the Centurion database. Parker has not denied this. He has described the database as "like a phone book" and said it was intended to help volunteers search for friends and acquaintances they could canvass. He has also said he obtained the list on what he described as the black market for $45,000. Both things cannot be simultaneously true.
By 13 May, Elections Alberta had issued 568 cease-and-desist letters: 23 to people identified as having received full copies of the list, and the rest to people who had created accounts to access the searchable database. Lorne Gibson, former Election Commissioner at Elections Alberta, told Canada's National Observer: "It's the largest data breach in Canada. I haven't heard of anything that surpasses that scale." Parker has not cooperated with the investigation and has refused to sign a statutory declaration confirming compliance with a direction to cease and desist. The RCMP announced its own investigation in April. Alberta's Privacy Commissioner opened a third parallel investigation in May. Elections Alberta is pursuing a permanent injunction at a Court of King's Bench hearing scheduled for later this summer.
Take Back Alberta, Parker's previous organisation, was fined $120,500 by Elections Alberta in February 2025 for circumventing election advertising spending limits and for accepting contributions from outside Alberta and Canada.
Parker refused to cooperate with that investigation too, and was subpoenaed. He told PressProgress regarding his donors: "I wouldn't want to be naming those donors if I was Elections Alberta. It's a dangerous game messing with the powerful."
The app and its architects
The Centurion Project is not a novel idea. It is an adaptation of a Michigan tool called 10xVotes. Parker says he spent nearly two years building the collaboration. "For almost two years, it'll be two years this fall, I've been working with them, talking with them, trying to build this out," he told a podcast. "And the result is the Centurion Project." He described it as "the 10x slash the Centurion Project app." A version of the Michigan app reviewed by PressProgress has a substantially similar interface to the Alberta tool.
The collaboration predates the public launch by at least a year. Canada's National Observer found a 10xVotes subdomain, https://t.co/Sel5WJO25t, registered in March 2025, a full year before the Centurion app went public, pre-stocked with names and addresses of several thousand Albertans concentrated in central Alberta around Red Deer. Approximately 150 entries were already marked "claimed," indicating active use. Elections Alberta appeared unaware the site existed until it was reported by media.
10xVotes is the assumed name of a company called Voteatron LLC, the brainchild of two west Michigan political operatives. Drew Born, a Grand Rapids commercial real estate broker and director of Voteatron, runs a group called Michigan Family Action and previously ran for chair of the Michigan GOP. He has promoted the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 plan on social media, been photographed at Turning Point USA galas at Mar-a-Lago posing with Project Veritas' James O'Keefe, and been photographed alongside Trump's FBI director Kash Patel. He has also advocated, in posts that are documented and archived, for the annexation of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Born's backers tout 10xVotes as a tool that helped deliver Michigan's 15 electoral college votes to Trump in the 2024 presidential election, and Michigan Republicans were holding statewide information sessions about the platform in hopes it would help return right-wing candidates to Congress in the 2026 midterms.
Parker told a podcast he "used all of my political capital with Tucker [Carlson] to get them to endorse it on stage that night," at a 2024 Tucker Carlson Live event in Grand Rapids where 10xVotes paid $50,000 for a VIP suite.
Drew Wierda, 10xVotes' other founder, introduces himself as the nephew of Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, the brother of Trump's first-term education secretary Betsy DeVos. Prince is himself a former donor to Pete Hoekstra's past congressional campaigns. Born and Wierda are both alumni of Hope College in Holland, Michigan, a private Christian liberal arts school affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church. This matters because the Dutch Reformed Christian-conservative donor network in west Michigan is not merely a religious community. It is a power structure, and Pete Hoekstra has operated inside it for decades.
The ambassador's network
US Ambassador Pete Hoekstra claims he was unaware that 10xVotes was being used by Alberta separatists. In his statement to PressProgress, he acknowledged having promoted the app in his earlier role but flatly denied personal involvement or financial stake. "I have zero involvement with 10xVotes," Hoekstra said. "I have never had any financial relationship with 10xVotes."
Born and Hoekstra are both listed as directors of the Mecosta Environmental and Security Alliance, a Michigan group opposing the construction of an EV battery manufacturing plant in west Michigan. Beyond that, Born is the stepson of JC Huizenga, a Michigan businessman and major GOP donor. Huizenga is a long-time donor to Hoekstra's past congressional campaigns. He and Hoekstra co-chaired Mitt Romney's 2012 West Michigan leadership team and served together as board members of the Netherland-America Foundation. Hoekstra was later appointed US ambassador to the Netherlands during Trump's first term, where he was accused of foreign interference after hosting an event at the US Embassy for the far-right Forum voor Democratie of Thierry Baudet, attended by approximately 30-40 party donors. Dutch MPs called it a potential violation of the Vienna Convention. The Dutch foreign ministry was asked to investigate.
Born's mother, Tammy Born Huizenga, has been appointed as a senior advisor to the US Department of Health and Human Services in support of RFK Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again agenda. The mother of the co-founder of the app whose Canadian adaptation is now subject to three concurrent investigations is currently serving inside the Trump administration.
Hoekstra, when asked whether the US government takes a position on US actors helping secessionist groups in Canada, said: "Who they work with in Canada is not our responsibility."
That is not a denial, it is a statement of non-accountability from the sitting USian ambassador to Canada.
On 8 May 2026, ten days after Parker's app launch, Hoekstra abruptly cancelled a planned speaking engagement at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Ottawa. Conference organisers said he had been recalled to Washington for urgent meetings. His spokesperson said he was in Washington with a Canadian business delegation for the SelectUSA Summit and was called to meetings with senior White House officials. Hoekstra has not returned to Canada.
The methodology of coercion
What 10xVotes and the Centurion Project built is not just an app. It is a system for identifying who is persuadable, where they live, and who in their social network can be deployed to apply personal pressure and manipulate their perception and decision-making.
The system works by asking each asset to identify ten people in their network who lean in the right political direction but do not reliably turn out. The asset is then responsible for those ten people. It is managed social manipulation, and it only functions if you know enough about your targets in advance.
That is where the electors list comes in. With 2.9 million names, addresses, voter ID numbers, electoral districts, and, in the root database, phone numbers for more than two million entries, the Centurion app was a surveillance apparatus with political organising as its public facing identity, pointed inward at Albertans, operated by a group with active ties to USian operatives who publicly advocate Alberta's annexation by the United States.
Canadian human rights defender and world-renowned philosopher Heather Marsh, whose work on data, democracy, and mass collaboration has been cited in academic and policy settings across Europe and North America, wrote about the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 with a precision that applies directly here:
"An uninformed vote is a coerced vote." — Heather Marsh
The broader argument is that without access to and trust in information, democratic participation collapses into deference to whoever controls the information environment.
The Centurion model does not even require convincing anyone of anything. It requires knowing where you live, who your neighbours are, and whether enough social pressure can be applied before referendum day. Marsh has written at length about the danger of transferring civic data to platforms outside democratic accountability.
"No one should be gifting their innermost thoughts to states and corporations. Personal data is used to coerce public opinion and advance the interests" of those who hold it. — Heather Marsh
The Centurion database, built on an illegally obtained provincial list, accessible to hundreds of unvetted people, and stored on infrastructure whose national jurisdiction remains publicly unconfirmed, is precisely the transfer she has spent years warning about.
Neither the Centurion Project nor 10xVotes has answered whether any Alberta voter data was stored on US servers. That question is material to any assessment under PIPEDA and Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act, and it remains open.
What the US gains from a broken Canada
The "I wasn't aware" framing papers over a question of motive. What does the Trump administration, or its aligned operatives, actually get from a destabilised Canada?
Alberta sits on approximately 167 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, nearly four times the volume of the entire United States. It accounts for 84% of Canada's total oil production and 60% of its natural gas output. The value of Alberta's energy production reached $139 billion in 2024. Bitumen production alone generated $95.8 billion that year. The oil sands can sustain current production rates for more than 140 years.
The US already buys nearly all of it: approximately 95-97% of Alberta's crude exports flow south. The problem, from a USian energy-dominance perspective, is that Canada controls the regulatory environment, the pipeline policy, and the pricing. A separated or annexed Alberta removes all three constraints simultaneously.
Between April 2025 and January 2026, the Alberta Prosperity Project met three times with US State Department officials. A joint meeting with the State Department and the US Treasury was planned for February 2026 to discuss a half-trillion dollar credit mechanism upon achieving independence.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in January 2026, described Albertans as "a very independent people" and called the province "a natural US partner."
The Alberta Prosperity Project's $500 billion credit ask, directed at the US Treasury, was not an ask for friendship. It was a request for US financing of Alberta's secession, with the implicit understanding that a newly independent Alberta indebted to Washington would not be negotiating pipeline policy from a position of sovereignty.
A separated or annexed Alberta means US access to those reserves without Canadian environmental regulation, without Canadian pipeline policy, and without negotiating with a federal government in Ottawa. It means the end of Canada as a coherent trade counterpart, arriving precisely as Trump's tariff war has made Canada's unified bargaining position its primary economic defence. A Canada that cannot hold itself together at the negotiating table is a Canada that cannot hold itself together at all.
The people who would benefit most from this outcome are currently in the Trump cabinet.
Doug Burgum, Interior Secretary and chair of the National Energy Council, controls all executive branch agencies involved in energy permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, and transportation. He comes from North Dakota, which sits directly on the US side of the Alberta border and whose oil industry competes with and is integrated into Alberta's. An Alberta without Canadian pipeline policy means Keystone XL-style infrastructure becomes approvable by executive order, with no Impact Assessment Act, no Crown consultation requirements under Treaties 6, 7, and 8, and no federal Canadian government to negotiate with.
Chris Wright, Energy Secretary and founder of Liberty Energy, is the fossil fuel industry's most prominent advocate inside the administration. Harold Hamm, executive chairman of Continental Resources and Wright's primary backer for the Energy Secretary role, helped organise a Mar-a-Lago event where Trump reportedly asked oil industry leaders to donate $1 billion to his campaign in exchange for deregulation. The deregulation Alberta's separation would provide, removing Canadian environmental law from 167 billion barrels of reserves, is worth orders of magnitude more than any domestic regulatory rollback.
The pipeline and infrastructure play is where private capital intersects most directly with the political goal. TC Energy, Enbridge, and Pembina Pipeline are the three major operators of Alberta export infrastructure. All three are Canadian-headquartered. Under annexation or deep integration, US firms would be positioned to compete for or acquire that infrastructure under USian ownership rules. Koch Industries, the largest private funder of anti-regulatory, anti-federal-government political activity in North America, has pipeline interests through its Flint Hills Resources subsidiary and political interests that align precisely with the regulatory arbitrage that Alberta separation would provide.
The royalty architecture matters too as Alberta oil currently generates royalties that flow to the Alberta government and, via equalization, partly to the Canadian federal government. An annexed Alberta means those royalties flow to a USian state or territorial government, with federal taxation going to DC. Over 140 years of production at current rates, the compounding fiscal value of that shift is incalculable.
Bessent's public statement calling Alberta a "natural US partner" is not idle commentary from a Treasury Secretary who manages the world's reserve currency. It is a signal to financial markets, to separatist organisers, and to the government of Alberta that the US is watching, is interested, and has not yet decided what it will not do.
Two tracks, one target
The US interference is overt, while the Russian interference is covert. A website called https://t.co/54Ry5r0OQx appeared after the 2025 federal election alongside YouTube and TikTok accounts of the same name. . Both were found to have been created by Storm-1516, a Russian covert influence network with a documented history of manufacturing fictional websites targeting audiences across multiple countries. The Kremlin-aligned Pravda News Network published 67 articles about Alberta or the "51st state" between December 2025 and April 2026, compared to 14 mentions of Ontario in the same period.
A coordinated network of roughly 20 YouTube channels promoting Alberta separation and US annexation, identified by the Canadian Digital Media Research Network, had accumulated 40 million cumulative views. The hosts turned out to be hired actors recruited on Upwork. The operators, identified by their digital trail, were based in the Netherlands. Hoekstra was the US ambassador to the Netherlands during Trump's first term.
US and Russian influence operations are increasingly converging, especially in coordinated influence and disruption campaigns aimed at the EU, Ukraine, the Baltics, Canada, Mexico, and other traditional allies. Regressive influencers tied to Tenet Media, which, according to a US indictment, is a US outlet funded by Russian interests, have amplified the same separatist content. A coordinated network of foreign-manufactured channels and domestically deployed surveillance infrastructure, built by operatives linked to the sitting US ambassador, targeting the same political fault line. Russia wants Canada to be unstable. The Trump regime wants Alberta's oil and a weakened federal government. While their methods and goals may differ on paper, the target is the same.
Marsh wrote in September 2025 about democratic self-determination being hijacked by foreign-manufactured content, specifically addressing USians facing questions about their own country's future.
"It is better to stand up and walk with dignity in your chosen path," "than to be swept along by Russian memes and TikTok analysis." — Heather Marsh
She was writing to USians about their own country's politics. The observation applies with equal force to Albertans being asked to make a generational decision about secession through an information environment shaped by Storm-1516, the Pravda News Network, Tucker Carlson, and a surveillance app built in Michigan. In the same post, responding to suggestions that Canada should merge with the United States, she was direct: "No means no, even for nice guys."
Part 1/](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HI20UdSagAAcsnG.png)
Olivia
Online
Mike Patterson
@pattersonmike01
Broadcast and multimedia journalist, father, photographer. Concerned about the environment, the climate crisis, equity.
Vancouver Island, Canada
Joined March 2018
216 Following
53 Followers
1.3K Posts
This might be the dumbest post I've seen from Adam Zivo.
People are dying from fentanyl. They weren't and aren't dying from safer supply programs.
And since we're apparently confusing correlation with causation, let me help out.
The drop in toxic drug deaths isn't because safer supply was restricted. It's because of years of work involving prevention, education, widespread naloxone distribution, supervised consumption sites, outreach workers, access to detox, treatment, recovery programs, and countless people keeping others alive long enough to get help.
You know... the very things many of the same critics spent years attacking.
It's almost as if reducing overdose deaths requires multiple interventions, not a single headline.
I hope this helps, Adam. Try not to pull a muscle from that stretch.
"We are in extreme danger," says climate scientist Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman), who warns that this summer "could be the hottest summer we've ever experienced in our lives, but it could also be the coolest summer for the rest of our lives."
Kalmus says he was forced to resign his job at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, where he worked for 15 years but faced growing pressure and censorship over his activism.
This one hits hard.
Oil companies will capture $90 BILLION this year from the war on Iran. Canadians are paying for it at the pump.
New Democrats are calling it what it is: war profiteering.
It's time to tax this unearned windfall and put that money back in Canadians' pockets.
Who to follow
Dukwalisala 🏴☠️🇺🇳
@NamgisFinn
Father, Husband, Son, Brother.
'Seeing all over the world'
Watershed Sentinel
@WatershSentinel
Environmental News from BC, Canada, and the world. Award-winning independent media from the grassroots.
Nicolás Pérez López-Ibor
@nicolas_pli
@IEuniversity @globalsquaremagazine @amorycaridad
I hope this helps someone today that's trying to figure things out.
People love to talk about "letting people hit rock bottom" or using "tough love" as if suffering is what saves people.
In my experience, it's often what kills them.
What changed my life wasn't abandonment, it was human connection.
For years, my grandmother watched me struggle with addiction. While others had given up hope, she never did.
Twice a year on my birthday and at Christmas she would come looking for me on the streets of Vancouver. She'd take me for a meal, give me a little money, tell me she loved me, and remind me that she believed I would recover one day. She never stopped believing, even at the times I had stopped believing in myself.
In 2013, I finally entered recovery again (like over the 12th time) I met my wife, and shortly after, we found out we were expecting our first child, and at the same time, my grandmother was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and given just two weeks to live.
Normally, you don't tell people about a pregnancy that early. But we knew she was dying, so we told her she was going to be a great-grandmother.
It was one of the most emotional conversations of my life.
She had tears in her eyes when she said, "I can't wait to meet my great-grandchild."
I laughed and said, "Grandma, I'm not very good at math, but that doesn't add up. They gave you two weeks." She squeezed my hand and said, "I'm going to stay."
And somehow, she did.
For the next nine months, my wife and I visited her every day in palliative care. We'd drink black coffee, watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, and spend every moment we could together.
She fought through unimaginable pain.
Long enough to meet her great-grandson, and long enough to spend nine precious months with her sober grandson.
Before she passed away, she told me something I'll never forget:
"I always knew you'd figure it out."
My grandmother didn't save my life with tough love, she saved it with love.
The kind of love that never gives up on people.
The kind of love that believes in someone until they can believe in themselves.
Sometimes, that's what recovery starts with!
I support recovery housing and people choosing abstinence.
But if the rule for supportive housing is "you must be drug-free," we're not going to solve homelessness.
What happens when someone relapses? Do we kick them out and make them homeless again?
Recovery housing attached to treatment programs makes sense, evicting people from supportive housing because they're struggling does not.
Housing should be the foundation for recovery, not the reward for achieving it.
This high school in Walnut, California just gave its parking lot a #solar upgrade. Shading vehicles and helping to power the school.
Shouldn't every parking lot get a #solarpower upgrade like this one? #ActOnClimate
#climateaction #climate #GreenNewDeal #renewables
3:40 AM.
I turn to my phone on the nightstand and confirm the time. I already know I’m not going back to sleep.
Not after another reckless act from a Premier who, by every measurable standard, appears completely off the rails.
So Danielle Smith can take comfort in one thing: she got through to us. Loud and clear.
Albertans understand now that something is deeply wrong.
Whether she is compromised by foreign interests, political extremists inside her own party, or simply by the pursuit of power itself almost no longer matters. The result is the same: a government willing to risk Alberta, risk Canada, and risk social stability to preserve political control.
And the hardest part is this: it feels abusive.
The endless pushing.
The endless escalation.
The endless chaos.
Albertans are exhausted.
We don’t need months of anxiety hanging over our heads because of some reckless October 19 referendum fantasy.
We do not need our province turned into a political powder keg while healthcare deteriorates, education suffers, corruption allegations pile up, and long-term economic planning is nowhere to be found.
This is not leadership.
Leadership lowers temperatures.
Leadership negotiates.
Leadership builds confidence.
Leadership protects institutions.
Instead, we see attacks on courts, attacks on vulnerable communities, attacks on public trust, and constant deflection from accountability.
And for what?
To distract from failures in governance?
To avoid scrutiny over corruption scandals?
To feed a movement built on grievance, anger, and permanent outrage?
I’m tired of short-term politics masquerading as vision.
I want a government thinking 25 and 50 years ahead.
I want honest stewardship of Alberta’s future.
I want competence, professionalism, and stability.
Most Albertans are not looking for revolution.
We are looking for adults in the room.
I’m a patriot. I will vote to stay.
And I believe millions of Canadians will stand with those of us who want no part of reckless separatist agendas or imported political extremism.
This province deserves better than permanent chaos.
It deserves leadership.
This is laughable, coming from someone who has been winking at the MAGA-aligned separatist movement for years.
People who are losing sleep over climate change are not the ones tearing our country apart: we’re trying to save it. This summer Canada could well be burning faster than we can build it.
BREAKING: Manitoba just approved a life-saving supervised consumption site. 🙌🏼🙌🏼
Apparently @DanMazierMP calls saving lives and connecting people to recovery a “failed experiment.”
I’m a recovering addict who was brought back to life six times after relapsing. If supervised consumption sites and harm reduction didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be over 13 years sober today. I wouldn’t have my beautiful family. I wouldn’t have an incredible job helping others find recovery.
People can debate policy all they want, but I’m and many others are living proof these services keep people alive long enough to recover.
Dead people don’t recover, Dan.
Do better.
This is gross behaviour👇@aarongunn
STATEMENT ON PROVINCIAL ADDRESS
The Premier of Alberta intervened to lower the threshold for getting a separatist question on the ballot. She then intervened to eliminate a review requiring the question be constitutional. She intervenes again tonight after yet another court has told the separatists to slow down and follow the law.
The premier can wrap these actions in the words of democracy, but she is willfully ignoring the will of the vast majority of Albertans who want no part of this separatist conversation.
The simple reality, a reality you would not find in her speech, is this: she has pushed along a question because a group has threatened to bring down her and her party if she does not.
Her internal political problems have become our national crisis.
The Premier asserts her patriotism. I will take her at her word, but I will remind her a patriot puts country ahead of party. A leader steers the agenda, rather than having it blindly dictated to them. An Albertan finds ways to do what’s right, not justifications for doing what’s wrong.
This baffling, referendum-on-a-referendum question will do nothing to settle anything. It adds another layer of confusion. It will divide. It will distract. It will damage.
I hope her government will consider how to step back from this madness before the damage to our province’s social fabric and economy is too great.
Corey Hogan MP
Calgary Confederation
The Centurion Project's voter surveillance tool was built by US political operatives with direct ties to the Trump regime. #abpoli #ableg #cdnpoli
The data on 2.9 million Albertans was loaded onto an app built with US funding, shaped by US political strategists, and deployed by a Canadian separatist organizer who spent nearly two years cultivating US partners before launching the Centurion Project. The question is not whether there is a US connection to what lawyers have called potentially the most significant privacy breach in Canadian history. The question is how deep the operation goes, who in the Trump orbit knew about it, and how far are they willing to take it.
On the night of 29 April 2026, David Parker stood in front of supporters at the Edmonton Oilfield Technical Society and unveiled the Centurion Project app, describing the technology as the same tool that "helped Trump win Michigan." Minutes after Parker finished speaking, an Elections Alberta investigator arrived with Edmonton police officers to inform organisers they were under investigation for improperly accessing and using the province's list of electors. Parker had already loaded the names, addresses, and voter identification numbers of every judge, every lawyer, every politician, every domestic abuse victim, every First Nations chief, every journalist, every senator, and every elections investigator in the province onto that app. Former premier Jason Kenney, on learning his home address had been shown to meeting participants, retained legal counsel and said he had previously received threats from people involved with the separatist, anti-vaccine, and far-right movements in Alberta. The database was accessible to anyone with the link, with no identity verification required.
Parker is a former Harper PMO staffer and the founder of Take Back Alberta, the political machinery credited with installing Danielle Smith as leader of the United Conservative Party. Smith attended Parker's wedding in 2023. UCP caucus staff attended an online Centurion Project meeting in April 2026, though the UCP says staff believed the data being presented had been legally obtained. Smith says she learned about the breach through media reports.
Elections Alberta confirmed the list came from the Republican Party of Alberta, a registered provincial party that advocates for independence, which had lawful access to the data. Investigators use fictitious "salt" names seeded into lists distributed to parties to identify the source of any leaked copy. Those salt names appeared in the Centurion database. Parker has not denied this. He has described the database as "like a phone book" and said it was intended to help volunteers search for friends and acquaintances they could canvass. He has also said he obtained the list on what he described as the black market for $45,000. Both things cannot be simultaneously true.
By 13 May, Elections Alberta had issued 568 cease-and-desist letters: 23 to people identified as having received full copies of the list, and the rest to people who had created accounts to access the searchable database. Lorne Gibson, former Election Commissioner at Elections Alberta, told Canada's National Observer: "It's the largest data breach in Canada. I haven't heard of anything that surpasses that scale." Parker has not cooperated with the investigation and has refused to sign a statutory declaration confirming compliance with a direction to cease and desist. The RCMP announced its own investigation in April. Alberta's Privacy Commissioner opened a third parallel investigation in May. Elections Alberta is pursuing a permanent injunction at a Court of King's Bench hearing scheduled for later this summer.
Take Back Alberta, Parker's previous organisation, was fined $120,500 by Elections Alberta in February 2025 for circumventing election advertising spending limits and for accepting contributions from outside Alberta and Canada.
Parker refused to cooperate with that investigation too, and was subpoenaed. He told PressProgress regarding his donors: "I wouldn't want to be naming those donors if I was Elections Alberta. It's a dangerous game messing with the powerful."
The app and its architects
The Centurion Project is not a novel idea. It is an adaptation of a Michigan tool called 10xVotes. Parker says he spent nearly two years building the collaboration. "For almost two years, it'll be two years this fall, I've been working with them, talking with them, trying to build this out," he told a podcast. "And the result is the Centurion Project." He described it as "the 10x slash the Centurion Project app." A version of the Michigan app reviewed by PressProgress has a substantially similar interface to the Alberta tool.
The collaboration predates the public launch by at least a year. Canada's National Observer found a 10xVotes subdomain, https://t.co/Sel5WJO25t, registered in March 2025, a full year before the Centurion app went public, pre-stocked with names and addresses of several thousand Albertans concentrated in central Alberta around Red Deer. Approximately 150 entries were already marked "claimed," indicating active use. Elections Alberta appeared unaware the site existed until it was reported by media.
10xVotes is the assumed name of a company called Voteatron LLC, the brainchild of two west Michigan political operatives. Drew Born, a Grand Rapids commercial real estate broker and director of Voteatron, runs a group called Michigan Family Action and previously ran for chair of the Michigan GOP. He has promoted the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 plan on social media, been photographed at Turning Point USA galas at Mar-a-Lago posing with Project Veritas' James O'Keefe, and been photographed alongside Trump's FBI director Kash Patel. He has also advocated, in posts that are documented and archived, for the annexation of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Born's backers tout 10xVotes as a tool that helped deliver Michigan's 15 electoral college votes to Trump in the 2024 presidential election, and Michigan Republicans were holding statewide information sessions about the platform in hopes it would help return right-wing candidates to Congress in the 2026 midterms.
Parker told a podcast he "used all of my political capital with Tucker [Carlson] to get them to endorse it on stage that night," at a 2024 Tucker Carlson Live event in Grand Rapids where 10xVotes paid $50,000 for a VIP suite.
Drew Wierda, 10xVotes' other founder, introduces himself as the nephew of Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, the brother of Trump's first-term education secretary Betsy DeVos. Prince is himself a former donor to Pete Hoekstra's past congressional campaigns. Born and Wierda are both alumni of Hope College in Holland, Michigan, a private Christian liberal arts school affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church. This matters because the Dutch Reformed Christian-conservative donor network in west Michigan is not merely a religious community. It is a power structure, and Pete Hoekstra has operated inside it for decades.
The ambassador's network
US Ambassador Pete Hoekstra claims he was unaware that 10xVotes was being used by Alberta separatists. In his statement to PressProgress, he acknowledged having promoted the app in his earlier role but flatly denied personal involvement or financial stake. "I have zero involvement with 10xVotes," Hoekstra said. "I have never had any financial relationship with 10xVotes."
Born and Hoekstra are both listed as directors of the Mecosta Environmental and Security Alliance, a Michigan group opposing the construction of an EV battery manufacturing plant in west Michigan. Beyond that, Born is the stepson of JC Huizenga, a Michigan businessman and major GOP donor. Huizenga is a long-time donor to Hoekstra's past congressional campaigns. He and Hoekstra co-chaired Mitt Romney's 2012 West Michigan leadership team and served together as board members of the Netherland-America Foundation. Hoekstra was later appointed US ambassador to the Netherlands during Trump's first term, where he was accused of foreign interference after hosting an event at the US Embassy for the far-right Forum voor Democratie of Thierry Baudet, attended by approximately 30-40 party donors. Dutch MPs called it a potential violation of the Vienna Convention. The Dutch foreign ministry was asked to investigate.
Born's mother, Tammy Born Huizenga, has been appointed as a senior advisor to the US Department of Health and Human Services in support of RFK Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again agenda. The mother of the co-founder of the app whose Canadian adaptation is now subject to three concurrent investigations is currently serving inside the Trump administration.
Hoekstra, when asked whether the US government takes a position on US actors helping secessionist groups in Canada, said: "Who they work with in Canada is not our responsibility."
That is not a denial, it is a statement of non-accountability from the sitting USian ambassador to Canada.
On 8 May 2026, ten days after Parker's app launch, Hoekstra abruptly cancelled a planned speaking engagement at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Ottawa. Conference organisers said he had been recalled to Washington for urgent meetings. His spokesperson said he was in Washington with a Canadian business delegation for the SelectUSA Summit and was called to meetings with senior White House officials. Hoekstra has not returned to Canada.
The methodology of coercion
What 10xVotes and the Centurion Project built is not just an app. It is a system for identifying who is persuadable, where they live, and who in their social network can be deployed to apply personal pressure and manipulate their perception and decision-making.
The system works by asking each asset to identify ten people in their network who lean in the right political direction but do not reliably turn out. The asset is then responsible for those ten people. It is managed social manipulation, and it only functions if you know enough about your targets in advance.
That is where the electors list comes in. With 2.9 million names, addresses, voter ID numbers, electoral districts, and, in the root database, phone numbers for more than two million entries, the Centurion app was a surveillance apparatus with political organising as its public facing identity, pointed inward at Albertans, operated by a group with active ties to USian operatives who publicly advocate Alberta's annexation by the United States.
Canadian human rights defender and world-renowned philosopher Heather Marsh, whose work on data, democracy, and mass collaboration has been cited in academic and policy settings across Europe and North America, wrote about the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 with a precision that applies directly here:
"An uninformed vote is a coerced vote." — Heather Marsh
The broader argument is that without access to and trust in information, democratic participation collapses into deference to whoever controls the information environment.
The Centurion model does not even require convincing anyone of anything. It requires knowing where you live, who your neighbours are, and whether enough social pressure can be applied before referendum day. Marsh has written at length about the danger of transferring civic data to platforms outside democratic accountability.
"No one should be gifting their innermost thoughts to states and corporations. Personal data is used to coerce public opinion and advance the interests" of those who hold it. — Heather Marsh
The Centurion database, built on an illegally obtained provincial list, accessible to hundreds of unvetted people, and stored on infrastructure whose national jurisdiction remains publicly unconfirmed, is precisely the transfer she has spent years warning about.
Neither the Centurion Project nor 10xVotes has answered whether any Alberta voter data was stored on US servers. That question is material to any assessment under PIPEDA and Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act, and it remains open.
What the US gains from a broken Canada
The "I wasn't aware" framing papers over a question of motive. What does the Trump administration, or its aligned operatives, actually get from a destabilised Canada?
Alberta sits on approximately 167 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, nearly four times the volume of the entire United States. It accounts for 84% of Canada's total oil production and 60% of its natural gas output. The value of Alberta's energy production reached $139 billion in 2024. Bitumen production alone generated $95.8 billion that year. The oil sands can sustain current production rates for more than 140 years.
The US already buys nearly all of it: approximately 95-97% of Alberta's crude exports flow south. The problem, from a USian energy-dominance perspective, is that Canada controls the regulatory environment, the pipeline policy, and the pricing. A separated or annexed Alberta removes all three constraints simultaneously.
Between April 2025 and January 2026, the Alberta Prosperity Project met three times with US State Department officials. A joint meeting with the State Department and the US Treasury was planned for February 2026 to discuss a half-trillion dollar credit mechanism upon achieving independence.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in January 2026, described Albertans as "a very independent people" and called the province "a natural US partner."
The Alberta Prosperity Project's $500 billion credit ask, directed at the US Treasury, was not an ask for friendship. It was a request for US financing of Alberta's secession, with the implicit understanding that a newly independent Alberta indebted to Washington would not be negotiating pipeline policy from a position of sovereignty.
A separated or annexed Alberta means US access to those reserves without Canadian environmental regulation, without Canadian pipeline policy, and without negotiating with a federal government in Ottawa. It means the end of Canada as a coherent trade counterpart, arriving precisely as Trump's tariff war has made Canada's unified bargaining position its primary economic defence. A Canada that cannot hold itself together at the negotiating table is a Canada that cannot hold itself together at all.
The people who would benefit most from this outcome are currently in the Trump cabinet.
Doug Burgum, Interior Secretary and chair of the National Energy Council, controls all executive branch agencies involved in energy permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, and transportation. He comes from North Dakota, which sits directly on the US side of the Alberta border and whose oil industry competes with and is integrated into Alberta's. An Alberta without Canadian pipeline policy means Keystone XL-style infrastructure becomes approvable by executive order, with no Impact Assessment Act, no Crown consultation requirements under Treaties 6, 7, and 8, and no federal Canadian government to negotiate with.
Chris Wright, Energy Secretary and founder of Liberty Energy, is the fossil fuel industry's most prominent advocate inside the administration. Harold Hamm, executive chairman of Continental Resources and Wright's primary backer for the Energy Secretary role, helped organise a Mar-a-Lago event where Trump reportedly asked oil industry leaders to donate $1 billion to his campaign in exchange for deregulation. The deregulation Alberta's separation would provide, removing Canadian environmental law from 167 billion barrels of reserves, is worth orders of magnitude more than any domestic regulatory rollback.
The pipeline and infrastructure play is where private capital intersects most directly with the political goal. TC Energy, Enbridge, and Pembina Pipeline are the three major operators of Alberta export infrastructure. All three are Canadian-headquartered. Under annexation or deep integration, US firms would be positioned to compete for or acquire that infrastructure under USian ownership rules. Koch Industries, the largest private funder of anti-regulatory, anti-federal-government political activity in North America, has pipeline interests through its Flint Hills Resources subsidiary and political interests that align precisely with the regulatory arbitrage that Alberta separation would provide.
The royalty architecture matters too as Alberta oil currently generates royalties that flow to the Alberta government and, via equalization, partly to the Canadian federal government. An annexed Alberta means those royalties flow to a USian state or territorial government, with federal taxation going to DC. Over 140 years of production at current rates, the compounding fiscal value of that shift is incalculable.
Bessent's public statement calling Alberta a "natural US partner" is not idle commentary from a Treasury Secretary who manages the world's reserve currency. It is a signal to financial markets, to separatist organisers, and to the government of Alberta that the US is watching, is interested, and has not yet decided what it will not do.
Two tracks, one target
The US interference is overt, while the Russian interference is covert. A website called https://t.co/54Ry5r0OQx appeared after the 2025 federal election alongside YouTube and TikTok accounts of the same name. . Both were found to have been created by Storm-1516, a Russian covert influence network with a documented history of manufacturing fictional websites targeting audiences across multiple countries. The Kremlin-aligned Pravda News Network published 67 articles about Alberta or the "51st state" between December 2025 and April 2026, compared to 14 mentions of Ontario in the same period.
A coordinated network of roughly 20 YouTube channels promoting Alberta separation and US annexation, identified by the Canadian Digital Media Research Network, had accumulated 40 million cumulative views. The hosts turned out to be hired actors recruited on Upwork. The operators, identified by their digital trail, were based in the Netherlands. Hoekstra was the US ambassador to the Netherlands during Trump's first term.
US and Russian influence operations are increasingly converging, especially in coordinated influence and disruption campaigns aimed at the EU, Ukraine, the Baltics, Canada, Mexico, and other traditional allies. Regressive influencers tied to Tenet Media, which, according to a US indictment, is a US outlet funded by Russian interests, have amplified the same separatist content. A coordinated network of foreign-manufactured channels and domestically deployed surveillance infrastructure, built by operatives linked to the sitting US ambassador, targeting the same political fault line. Russia wants Canada to be unstable. The Trump regime wants Alberta's oil and a weakened federal government. While their methods and goals may differ on paper, the target is the same.
Marsh wrote in September 2025 about democratic self-determination being hijacked by foreign-manufactured content, specifically addressing USians facing questions about their own country's future.
"It is better to stand up and walk with dignity in your chosen path," "than to be swept along by Russian memes and TikTok analysis." — Heather Marsh
She was writing to USians about their own country's politics. The observation applies with equal force to Albertans being asked to make a generational decision about secession through an information environment shaped by Storm-1516, the Pravda News Network, Tucker Carlson, and a surveillance app built in Michigan. In the same post, responding to suggestions that Canada should merge with the United States, she was direct: "No means no, even for nice guys."
Part 1/
![YourAnonCentral's tweet photo. The Centurion Project's voter surveillance tool was built by US political operatives with direct ties to the Trump regime. #abpoli #ableg #cdnpoli
The data on 2.9 million Albertans was loaded onto an app built with US funding, shaped by US political strategists, and deployed by a Canadian separatist organizer who spent nearly two years cultivating US partners before launching the Centurion Project. The question is not whether there is a US connection to what lawyers have called potentially the most significant privacy breach in Canadian history. The question is how deep the operation goes, who in the Trump orbit knew about it, and how far are they willing to take it.
On the night of 29 April 2026, David Parker stood in front of supporters at the Edmonton Oilfield Technical Society and unveiled the Centurion Project app, describing the technology as the same tool that "helped Trump win Michigan." Minutes after Parker finished speaking, an Elections Alberta investigator arrived with Edmonton police officers to inform organisers they were under investigation for improperly accessing and using the province's list of electors. Parker had already loaded the names, addresses, and voter identification numbers of every judge, every lawyer, every politician, every domestic abuse victim, every First Nations chief, every journalist, every senator, and every elections investigator in the province onto that app. Former premier Jason Kenney, on learning his home address had been shown to meeting participants, retained legal counsel and said he had previously received threats from people involved with the separatist, anti-vaccine, and far-right movements in Alberta. The database was accessible to anyone with the link, with no identity verification required.
Parker is a former Harper PMO staffer and the founder of Take Back Alberta, the political machinery credited with installing Danielle Smith as leader of the United Conservative Party. Smith attended Parker's wedding in 2023. UCP caucus staff attended an online Centurion Project meeting in April 2026, though the UCP says staff believed the data being presented had been legally obtained. Smith says she learned about the breach through media reports.
Elections Alberta confirmed the list came from the Republican Party of Alberta, a registered provincial party that advocates for independence, which had lawful access to the data. Investigators use fictitious "salt" names seeded into lists distributed to parties to identify the source of any leaked copy. Those salt names appeared in the Centurion database. Parker has not denied this. He has described the database as "like a phone book" and said it was intended to help volunteers search for friends and acquaintances they could canvass. He has also said he obtained the list on what he described as the black market for $45,000. Both things cannot be simultaneously true.
By 13 May, Elections Alberta had issued 568 cease-and-desist letters: 23 to people identified as having received full copies of the list, and the rest to people who had created accounts to access the searchable database. Lorne Gibson, former Election Commissioner at Elections Alberta, told Canada's National Observer: "It's the largest data breach in Canada. I haven't heard of anything that surpasses that scale." Parker has not cooperated with the investigation and has refused to sign a statutory declaration confirming compliance with a direction to cease and desist. The RCMP announced its own investigation in April. Alberta's Privacy Commissioner opened a third parallel investigation in May. Elections Alberta is pursuing a permanent injunction at a Court of King's Bench hearing scheduled for later this summer.
Take Back Alberta, Parker's previous organisation, was fined $120,500 by Elections Alberta in February 2025 for circumventing election advertising spending limits and for accepting contributions from outside Alberta and Canada.
Parker refused to cooperate with that investigation too, and was subpoenaed. He told PressProgress regarding his donors: "I wouldn't want to be naming those donors if I was Elections Alberta. It's a dangerous game messing with the powerful."
The app and its architects
The Centurion Project is not a novel idea. It is an adaptation of a Michigan tool called 10xVotes. Parker says he spent nearly two years building the collaboration. "For almost two years, it'll be two years this fall, I've been working with them, talking with them, trying to build this out," he told a podcast. "And the result is the Centurion Project." He described it as "the 10x slash the Centurion Project app." A version of the Michigan app reviewed by PressProgress has a substantially similar interface to the Alberta tool.
The collaboration predates the public launch by at least a year. Canada's National Observer found a 10xVotes subdomain, https://t.co/Sel5WJO25t, registered in March 2025, a full year before the Centurion app went public, pre-stocked with names and addresses of several thousand Albertans concentrated in central Alberta around Red Deer. Approximately 150 entries were already marked "claimed," indicating active use. Elections Alberta appeared unaware the site existed until it was reported by media.
10xVotes is the assumed name of a company called Voteatron LLC, the brainchild of two west Michigan political operatives. Drew Born, a Grand Rapids commercial real estate broker and director of Voteatron, runs a group called Michigan Family Action and previously ran for chair of the Michigan GOP. He has promoted the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 plan on social media, been photographed at Turning Point USA galas at Mar-a-Lago posing with Project Veritas' James O'Keefe, and been photographed alongside Trump's FBI director Kash Patel. He has also advocated, in posts that are documented and archived, for the annexation of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Born's backers tout 10xVotes as a tool that helped deliver Michigan's 15 electoral college votes to Trump in the 2024 presidential election, and Michigan Republicans were holding statewide information sessions about the platform in hopes it would help return right-wing candidates to Congress in the 2026 midterms.
Parker told a podcast he "used all of my political capital with Tucker [Carlson] to get them to endorse it on stage that night," at a 2024 Tucker Carlson Live event in Grand Rapids where 10xVotes paid $50,000 for a VIP suite.
Drew Wierda, 10xVotes' other founder, introduces himself as the nephew of Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, the brother of Trump's first-term education secretary Betsy DeVos. Prince is himself a former donor to Pete Hoekstra's past congressional campaigns. Born and Wierda are both alumni of Hope College in Holland, Michigan, a private Christian liberal arts school affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church. This matters because the Dutch Reformed Christian-conservative donor network in west Michigan is not merely a religious community. It is a power structure, and Pete Hoekstra has operated inside it for decades.
The ambassador's network
US Ambassador Pete Hoekstra claims he was unaware that 10xVotes was being used by Alberta separatists. In his statement to PressProgress, he acknowledged having promoted the app in his earlier role but flatly denied personal involvement or financial stake. "I have zero involvement with 10xVotes," Hoekstra said. "I have never had any financial relationship with 10xVotes."
Born and Hoekstra are both listed as directors of the Mecosta Environmental and Security Alliance, a Michigan group opposing the construction of an EV battery manufacturing plant in west Michigan. Beyond that, Born is the stepson of JC Huizenga, a Michigan businessman and major GOP donor. Huizenga is a long-time donor to Hoekstra's past congressional campaigns. He and Hoekstra co-chaired Mitt Romney's 2012 West Michigan leadership team and served together as board members of the Netherland-America Foundation. Hoekstra was later appointed US ambassador to the Netherlands during Trump's first term, where he was accused of foreign interference after hosting an event at the US Embassy for the far-right Forum voor Democratie of Thierry Baudet, attended by approximately 30-40 party donors. Dutch MPs called it a potential violation of the Vienna Convention. The Dutch foreign ministry was asked to investigate.
Born's mother, Tammy Born Huizenga, has been appointed as a senior advisor to the US Department of Health and Human Services in support of RFK Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again agenda. The mother of the co-founder of the app whose Canadian adaptation is now subject to three concurrent investigations is currently serving inside the Trump administration.
Hoekstra, when asked whether the US government takes a position on US actors helping secessionist groups in Canada, said: "Who they work with in Canada is not our responsibility."
That is not a denial, it is a statement of non-accountability from the sitting USian ambassador to Canada.
On 8 May 2026, ten days after Parker's app launch, Hoekstra abruptly cancelled a planned speaking engagement at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Ottawa. Conference organisers said he had been recalled to Washington for urgent meetings. His spokesperson said he was in Washington with a Canadian business delegation for the SelectUSA Summit and was called to meetings with senior White House officials. Hoekstra has not returned to Canada.
The methodology of coercion
What 10xVotes and the Centurion Project built is not just an app. It is a system for identifying who is persuadable, where they live, and who in their social network can be deployed to apply personal pressure and manipulate their perception and decision-making.
The system works by asking each asset to identify ten people in their network who lean in the right political direction but do not reliably turn out. The asset is then responsible for those ten people. It is managed social manipulation, and it only functions if you know enough about your targets in advance.
That is where the electors list comes in. With 2.9 million names, addresses, voter ID numbers, electoral districts, and, in the root database, phone numbers for more than two million entries, the Centurion app was a surveillance apparatus with political organising as its public facing identity, pointed inward at Albertans, operated by a group with active ties to USian operatives who publicly advocate Alberta's annexation by the United States.
Canadian human rights defender and world-renowned philosopher Heather Marsh, whose work on data, democracy, and mass collaboration has been cited in academic and policy settings across Europe and North America, wrote about the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 with a precision that applies directly here:
"An uninformed vote is a coerced vote." — Heather Marsh
The broader argument is that without access to and trust in information, democratic participation collapses into deference to whoever controls the information environment.
The Centurion model does not even require convincing anyone of anything. It requires knowing where you live, who your neighbours are, and whether enough social pressure can be applied before referendum day. Marsh has written at length about the danger of transferring civic data to platforms outside democratic accountability.
"No one should be gifting their innermost thoughts to states and corporations. Personal data is used to coerce public opinion and advance the interests" of those who hold it. — Heather Marsh
The Centurion database, built on an illegally obtained provincial list, accessible to hundreds of unvetted people, and stored on infrastructure whose national jurisdiction remains publicly unconfirmed, is precisely the transfer she has spent years warning about.
Neither the Centurion Project nor 10xVotes has answered whether any Alberta voter data was stored on US servers. That question is material to any assessment under PIPEDA and Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act, and it remains open.
What the US gains from a broken Canada
The "I wasn't aware" framing papers over a question of motive. What does the Trump administration, or its aligned operatives, actually get from a destabilised Canada?
Alberta sits on approximately 167 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, nearly four times the volume of the entire United States. It accounts for 84% of Canada's total oil production and 60% of its natural gas output. The value of Alberta's energy production reached $139 billion in 2024. Bitumen production alone generated $95.8 billion that year. The oil sands can sustain current production rates for more than 140 years.
The US already buys nearly all of it: approximately 95-97% of Alberta's crude exports flow south. The problem, from a USian energy-dominance perspective, is that Canada controls the regulatory environment, the pipeline policy, and the pricing. A separated or annexed Alberta removes all three constraints simultaneously.
Between April 2025 and January 2026, the Alberta Prosperity Project met three times with US State Department officials. A joint meeting with the State Department and the US Treasury was planned for February 2026 to discuss a half-trillion dollar credit mechanism upon achieving independence.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in January 2026, described Albertans as "a very independent people" and called the province "a natural US partner."
The Alberta Prosperity Project's $500 billion credit ask, directed at the US Treasury, was not an ask for friendship. It was a request for US financing of Alberta's secession, with the implicit understanding that a newly independent Alberta indebted to Washington would not be negotiating pipeline policy from a position of sovereignty.
A separated or annexed Alberta means US access to those reserves without Canadian environmental regulation, without Canadian pipeline policy, and without negotiating with a federal government in Ottawa. It means the end of Canada as a coherent trade counterpart, arriving precisely as Trump's tariff war has made Canada's unified bargaining position its primary economic defence. A Canada that cannot hold itself together at the negotiating table is a Canada that cannot hold itself together at all.
The people who would benefit most from this outcome are currently in the Trump cabinet.
Doug Burgum, Interior Secretary and chair of the National Energy Council, controls all executive branch agencies involved in energy permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, and transportation. He comes from North Dakota, which sits directly on the US side of the Alberta border and whose oil industry competes with and is integrated into Alberta's. An Alberta without Canadian pipeline policy means Keystone XL-style infrastructure becomes approvable by executive order, with no Impact Assessment Act, no Crown consultation requirements under Treaties 6, 7, and 8, and no federal Canadian government to negotiate with.
Chris Wright, Energy Secretary and founder of Liberty Energy, is the fossil fuel industry's most prominent advocate inside the administration. Harold Hamm, executive chairman of Continental Resources and Wright's primary backer for the Energy Secretary role, helped organise a Mar-a-Lago event where Trump reportedly asked oil industry leaders to donate $1 billion to his campaign in exchange for deregulation. The deregulation Alberta's separation would provide, removing Canadian environmental law from 167 billion barrels of reserves, is worth orders of magnitude more than any domestic regulatory rollback.
The pipeline and infrastructure play is where private capital intersects most directly with the political goal. TC Energy, Enbridge, and Pembina Pipeline are the three major operators of Alberta export infrastructure. All three are Canadian-headquartered. Under annexation or deep integration, US firms would be positioned to compete for or acquire that infrastructure under USian ownership rules. Koch Industries, the largest private funder of anti-regulatory, anti-federal-government political activity in North America, has pipeline interests through its Flint Hills Resources subsidiary and political interests that align precisely with the regulatory arbitrage that Alberta separation would provide.
The royalty architecture matters too as Alberta oil currently generates royalties that flow to the Alberta government and, via equalization, partly to the Canadian federal government. An annexed Alberta means those royalties flow to a USian state or territorial government, with federal taxation going to DC. Over 140 years of production at current rates, the compounding fiscal value of that shift is incalculable.
Bessent's public statement calling Alberta a "natural US partner" is not idle commentary from a Treasury Secretary who manages the world's reserve currency. It is a signal to financial markets, to separatist organisers, and to the government of Alberta that the US is watching, is interested, and has not yet decided what it will not do.
Two tracks, one target
The US interference is overt, while the Russian interference is covert. A website called https://t.co/54Ry5r0OQx appeared after the 2025 federal election alongside YouTube and TikTok accounts of the same name. . Both were found to have been created by Storm-1516, a Russian covert influence network with a documented history of manufacturing fictional websites targeting audiences across multiple countries. The Kremlin-aligned Pravda News Network published 67 articles about Alberta or the "51st state" between December 2025 and April 2026, compared to 14 mentions of Ontario in the same period.
A coordinated network of roughly 20 YouTube channels promoting Alberta separation and US annexation, identified by the Canadian Digital Media Research Network, had accumulated 40 million cumulative views. The hosts turned out to be hired actors recruited on Upwork. The operators, identified by their digital trail, were based in the Netherlands. Hoekstra was the US ambassador to the Netherlands during Trump's first term.
US and Russian influence operations are increasingly converging, especially in coordinated influence and disruption campaigns aimed at the EU, Ukraine, the Baltics, Canada, Mexico, and other traditional allies. Regressive influencers tied to Tenet Media, which, according to a US indictment, is a US outlet funded by Russian interests, have amplified the same separatist content. A coordinated network of foreign-manufactured channels and domestically deployed surveillance infrastructure, built by operatives linked to the sitting US ambassador, targeting the same political fault line. Russia wants Canada to be unstable. The Trump regime wants Alberta's oil and a weakened federal government. While their methods and goals may differ on paper, the target is the same.
Marsh wrote in September 2025 about democratic self-determination being hijacked by foreign-manufactured content, specifically addressing USians facing questions about their own country's future.
"It is better to stand up and walk with dignity in your chosen path," "than to be swept along by Russian memes and TikTok analysis." — Heather Marsh
She was writing to USians about their own country's politics. The observation applies with equal force to Albertans being asked to make a generational decision about secession through an information environment shaped by Storm-1516, the Pravda News Network, Tucker Carlson, and a surveillance app built in Michigan. In the same post, responding to suggestions that Canada should merge with the United States, she was direct: "No means no, even for nice guys."
Part 1/](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HI20eQ3bIAAHQVK.jpg)
Urban and culturally diverse, citizens who welcome immigrants, feel strongly about staying in Canada, mostly support marginalized and vulnerable communities; Alberta is not nearly as “anti-woke” as some say, writes U of A prof/author Timothy Caulfield.
https://t.co/N2ZMhbD7WK
𝐒𝐚𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐡 𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐥
The Saanich Youth Council is backing, in principle, the Reconciliation Corridor Initiative and is calling on all levels of government to support the return of passenger rail on Vancouver Island’s historic corridor.
The group has sent letters to federal and provincial leaders and will bring a motion to Saanich council seeking formal endorsement of the initiative. The motion also asks that the mayor write to senior federal, provincial and regional officials seeking support for the initiative.
The project involves First Nations and local governments examining the potential for passenger rail service along part of the Island corridor between Vic West and Langford.
The youth council stressed its support is for the planning process, not any specific route, technology or funding model.
“It’s exciting to think that I could take a train to Langford to visit friends and participate in extracurriculars,” said Yul Choe, a Grade 11 student at Mount Douglas Secondary. “Trains are a sustainable way of moving a large number of people around the region.”
The Island corridor is a 289-kilometre rail line running from Victoria to Courtenay and Parksville to Port Alberni. While the section under consideration does not pass through Saanich, the youth council said the project has regional implications tied to transportation, housing and climate goals.
Coun. Teale Phelps Bondaroff, who helped establish the youth council, praised the group’s focus on transportation issues affecting young people.
“It has been inspiring to work with these students as they explore the priorities that most impact youth in our region,” he said. “Members have been thoughtful and engaged, and worked hard to survey their peers in order to identify transportation as a priority issue.”
Article: https://t.co/8dqKSfzrqF
Restore Island Rail
https://t.co/Upy4I0VfSQ
“We could lose a lot of species under this plan. We could lose all the species that are in inconvenient locations where proponents want to build things or do things.” Margot Venton, Ecojustice, on waiving “jeopardy test.”
#endangeredspecies #environment
https://t.co/AzmSu75AVB
“Unexpected corners of Vancouver” while literally showing the parts of Vancouver the world already recognizes the most.
What a painfully out-of-touch commercial.
A triple-headed monster: 'pandemics, climate change and disinformation which blocks our ability to respond'- Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics & molecular virology / dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine in TX.
https://t.co/09JDZX0oUo
What would you do if our taxes didn’t pay your salary for the last 22 years?
Would you go back to your previous job at a Telus call centre?
Or your only other real life experience as a paperboy?
You definitely wouldn’t be a millionaire living in a mansion.
Last Seen Users on Sotwe
Trends for you
Most Popular Users
Elon Musk 
@elonmusk
240.4M followers
Barack Obama
@barackobama
119.3M followers
Donald J. Trump
@realdonaldtrump
111.7M followers
Cristiano Ronaldo
@cristiano
110M followers
Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
107M followers
Rihanna
@rihanna
97.5M followers
NASA
@nasa
92.1M followers
Justin Bieber
@justinbieber
90.8M followers
KATY PERRY
@katyperry
87.4M followers
Taylor Swift
@taylorswift13
81.2M followers
Lady Gaga
@ladygaga
72.7M followers
Kim Kardashian
@kimkardashian
69.6M followers
Virat Kohli
@imvkohli
69.4M followers
YouTube
@youtube
68.6M followers
Bill Gates
@billgates
63.7M followers
The Ellen Show
@theellenshow
62.5M followers
Neymar Jr
@neymarjr
62.1M followers
CNN
@cnn
61.9M followers
X
@x
60.8M followers
Selena Gomez
@selenagomez
60.5M followers
✨
⭐
💫