Privacy legislation may need to be beefed up: MLA Hunter

Posted on July 16, 2026 by Ryan Dahlman

By Trevor Busch
Commentator/Courier
editor@tabertimes.com

After a massive privacy breach earlier this year exposed the personal information of millions of Alberta voters online, citizens are still waiting for more answers as Elections Alberta conducts its own investigation. 

Information originally came to light in late April regarding how a third-party advertiser supporting Alberta independence, the Centurion Project, had somehow obtained Alberta’s comprehensive voter list. When Elections Alberta sought out fake names it embeds into the list to assist investigators in obtaining the origin of the information when a leak or breach occurs, it was determined the list had matched one legitimately provided to the pro-independence Republican Party of Alberta in June 2025. 

The Centurion Project has denied any wrongdoing and says the information came from a “third party”, and it is not immediately clear how the organization obtained the same list. Elections Alberta has indicated that thousands of people may have already accessed the database. 

Taber-Warner MLA Grant Hunter says the appropriate actions have now been taken with regard to the alleged privacy breach and multiple investigations are underway.

“You’ve got Elections Alberta, the RCMP, you’ve got the privacy commissioner looking into this – anytime you have something like this happen, I think it’s important to make sure that we get to the bottom of it very quickly,” said Hunter, who also serves as Minister of Environment and Protected Areas. “Anytime you have a breach in the privacy of electoral information that’s egregious, it’s terrible, and should never have happened, but we live in a society where some people do bad things, and so the Centurion Project, it looks like that breach was done through the Republican Party of Alberta, and so we fully expect that Elections Alberta will deal with it, and we’ll press charges, and that those who have done these things that they shouldn’t have done either will be charged or go to jail. It’s as simple as that. So that’s what should happen.” 

“Now, I know I’ve heard the NDP saying you should do this, you should do that. Well, the NDP says that you’re not supposed to intervene in these things, and now they’re telling us to intervene,” continued Hunter.

Hunter conceded there might need to be significant reform of Alberta’s privacy legislation and how it applies to political parties in the province.

“I think that there might need to be. I don’t understand how the Republican Party of Alberta got the list. I don’t think that they ran one candidate last election, so how would they have the same list as a party like the United Conservative Party or the NDP, who ran candidates in every riding? It doesn’t make sense to me, but I think the key thing here is to let Elections Alberta and the RCMP investigations determine what happens, do their investigation, and then figure out if they’ve got some recommendations that we can see, that we can make some changes. We’re very interested and willing to do that.”

Evidence obtained by other media strongly suggests Elections Alberta was aware of the alleged privacy breach as early as late March, but told whistleblowers it couldn’t investigate based on the recent implications of the province’s Bill 54, or the Elections Finances and Contributions Disclosure Act, which places a higher threshold on what evidence is required to initiate an investigation.

“There’s been some talk about whether or not Bill 54 changed the ability of the elections commissioner to do the investigation, because the investigation should have been done sooner. We agree that it should have been done sooner, and Elections Alberta said that they had no ability to do that because of the changes made to Bill 54. To be clear, the Act reads specifically, Section 153, that the elections commissioner ‘may conduct an investigation into a matter that the elections commissioner has reasonable grounds to believe is an offence under this act in the following circumstances: a) if the elections commissioner receives a complaint from a person’, which happened. ‘b) at the request of the Chief Electoral Officer’ or ‘c) on the Elections Commissioner’s own initiative.’ So nothing’s changed in the materiality of them being able to do their work and check in to see if there’s been a breach, and we’re wondering and would like to figure out why they didn’t act on it quicker. They had the information, they had been told that there was a breach or that it was a suspected breach, and the fact that they actually didn’t do something about that is what we need to bottle up.”

In late June, a proposed class-action lawsuit was filed over the alleged voter privacy breach and names Alberta’s Justice minister, chief electoral officer, Centurion Project Ltd., the Republican Party of Alberta, David Parker and some unidentified defendants. The lawsuit alleges the personal information of some 2.9 million Alberta voters was illegally breached.