'We need to control the party': a look inside Take Back Alberta's UCP insurgency
Pro-Danielle Smith grassroots group's ambitions extend well beyond election
David Parker was visibly irritated.
The head of Take Back Alberta had become aware of a little checkmark box on his group's event registration page, asking permission to give supporters' personal information to their local United Conservative Party campaign coordinator.
"We can't be collecting people's information and giving it to campaigns or anything like that," Parker told TBA's other top organizers.
"Right now we've just violated election law. So I'm going to have to report that to Elections Alberta now."
There are some apparent grey zones in rules limiting how registered third-party advertisers like Take Back Alberta can interact with political parties. This was not one.
Elections Alberta prohibits parties and third-party groups from sharing Albertans' personal information.
Benita Pedersen, the group's Edmonton-area director, chimed in. "We'll say it was an error on the Cognito form and we haven't shared anyone's information." "Exactly," colleague Jarrad McCoy agreed.
This was a Zoom video exchange recorded in mid-April and posted on the video-sharing site Rumble. It was chatter between Take Back's leaders before Parker and his team switched to the Zoom event that was intended for a wider audience: a weekly seminar training people how to persuade friends, neighbours and strangers to vote conservative.
Pressure points
The admission of apparent rule-breaking, just as Take Back Alberta was set to give its UCP-friendly advice to activists, highlights the delicate dance this group is bidding to engage in as Alberta's election gets underway. The evident modus operandi: do what you can to re-elect Danielle Smith's UCP government, but don't imperil this group's third-party privileges and ability to engage in the political game as a major pressure organization.
After all, this is no ordinary third-party group in Alberta. It's one that claims to have uniquely set Alberta politics, and especially the UCP, on the path that Parker's group prefers.
Parker and his Take Back group take credit for ditching Jason Kenney as UCP leader and premier, helping elect the more libertarian Danielle Smith as his successor, putting half the governing party's board in the group's "control," and mobilizing new party members to nominate TBA-friendly and more activist UCP candidates.
He's built such an affinity with UCP leader Danielle Smith that the premier attended Parker's small March wedding in the Rockies, the Globe and Mail recently reported. Smith downplayed it, saying: "I've got lots of friends."
But it's clear that between Parker's boasts and the private concerns of more moderate UCP organizers, Take Back is a force with deep influence throughout the party.
And it's intent on preserving and expanding that power, beyond the May 29 election.
'Shoot your way out'
Parker, the son of a rural Alberta preacher, has spoken at likely hundreds of events, mainly in rural Alberta. He's implored thousands of conservative-minded voters to be active in party politics and local affairs.
He also speaks of the stakes in dire terms. It's not just conservatives versus progressives, he told a seminar of more than 100 adherents in Grande Prairie.
"This is a war between the pro-humans and anti-humans," he said. Parker referred to abortion, and modern urban women's impulse to delay having children for their careers' sake.
He also argues that NDP and progressives want to depopulate society for the sake of the environment. "You are the carbon they are trying to reduce."
Albertans have no option but to stop the NDP, he told the Grande Prairie crowd.
"You can vote your way into socialism," Parker said. "You almost always have to shoot your way out."
Canadian history contradicts this violent claim. Alberta and five other provinces have elected NDP governments before, and all have removed them peacefully, through the ballot box.
Asked last week about this "shooting" remark, Parker said he was talking about totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union. The Alberta NDP isn't there, but "they're definitely headed in that direction."
Parker, 34, has been a conservative activist since his teens, when he got involved on a central Alberta MP's constituency board. In his spiel to various TBA meetings this year, he explains that he's served in former prime minister Stephen Harper's regional office, the 2012 election war room of then-Wildrose Party leader Smith and former federal Conservative Erin O'Toole's leadership campaign.
He also says he helped campaign to bring down Andrew Scheer as federal leader, and organized for the UCP's Kenney — until COVID and his Alberta crackdown on restriction-violating pastors: then, Parker said at one event, "I declared war on Jason Kenney, and I said I would not rest until he was defeated."
He formed Take Back Alberta last year and registered the group as a third-party advertiser, but never engaged in much advertising on billboards or websites like most registered third parties do. He was mobilizing grassroots activists within the UCP coalition that Kenney had formed, to take the leader down.
Parker and his group, motivated heavily by their resistance to COVID vaccine mandates and public health rules, encouraged thousands to enlist as UCP members to reject Kenney in his leadership review. He succeeded, when Kenney last May got support levels too anemic from his own party to stay on.
The organization boasts as its CFO Marco Van Huigenbos, the Fort Macleod town councillor who is charged with mischief for his role in organizing the Coutts trucker blockade. Take Back has also rallied in support of those charged with offenses at Coutts.
Take Back didn't quit its political mission when it had pushed out Kenney. It kept holding rallies, and even offered to collect UCP leadership ballots at some of its events around Alberta to deliver votes to the central party.
Parker expressed great veneration for Smith, who herself had firmly opposed vaccine mandates and the mainstream public health wisdom on COVID. "Probably almost nobody in this room works harder than her for your freedom. She deserves your thanks," he said at one of Smith's UCP leadership campaign events in Three Hills.
Friends in high places
The UCP leader and Parker spoke with each other "fairly regularly" throughout last year about politics, ideas and philosophy, the Take Back leader told CBC News in an interview. The conversations have become less frequent and non-political since January, to keep in line with rules that constrain interactions between party and third-party figures, he added.
In Grande Prairie, Parker lauded her for firing the Alberta Health Services board and top public health doctor Deena Hinshaw. "She has taken so much flack that, guess what? One out of three people at doors in Calgary say Danielle Smith is crazy," Parker told the group. "Why do they say that? Because she stood up for you."
However, leadership has not been Take Back's sole fixation. Parker's group has worked to mobilize its believers to flood United Conservative party events and take the majority of posts on riding boards.
They've taken the same approach with the contests to nominate UCP candidates, throughout Take Back's rural base and in cities.
On the group's Telegram social media channel, they call UCP candidates like Eric Bouchard in Calgary–Lougheed "our guy." He's said online that the closure of his restaurant during COVID motivated him to get political.
Parker lauded Chelsae Petrovic in Livingstone–Macleod as "another freedom fighter!"
However, Take Back's biggest organizational feat was sending hundreds of believers to the UCP annual meeting last fall, all bent on electing TBA-supported directors to the party's provincial board.
The group swept all nine seats, to control half the party's influential board.
Half plus half equals...
"That is a job that is only half done," Parker said months later in Grande Prairie. He explained that at the 2023 United Conservative AGM in Calgary, the other half of the provincial party board gets elected.
"So start saving up your money. We've got to go to Calgary and we have to finish this job."
He explained the rationale: "Leaders come and go, folks. We need to control the party. We need to control the party that's in power."
A board can reject candidates it's worried about, Parker explained (the UCP has done so with ones it fears controversial). It can even remove the party membership of any member, "including the leader."
This power is seldom wielded, but the current UCP leader did so this spring to punish a Take Back organizer.
Tim Hoven, whom the board blocked from challenging the UCP nomination of former cabinet minister Jason Nixon in Rimbey–Rocky Mountain House, has launched a run against him as an independent. And the board recently revoked his UCP membership, Hoven confirmed this week.
"It's pretty simple: if you're the one in the room making the decisions, you're the one in control," Parker said in an interview. He added that electing Take Back supporters to the rest of the board would help, because current UCP president Cynthia Moore "is very hostile to us, actively going around spouting NDP talking points" about the group.
Moore and several other UCP provincial directors joined the board under Kenney; tensions between them and the new faction have stayed largely private, until now.
Told of Parker's remark, Moore praised the professionalism of the UCP. "I'm proud of the efforts of our board and our staff," she said in a text message.
Third party, governing party
Parker registered Take Back Alberta as a third-party advertiser with Elections Alberta to ensure his group could legally advocate in provincial politics, and collect both individual and corporate donations to do so. But that right comes with strict rules about affiliating with a party.
A third-party group is restricted from sharing its key officers with a party like the UCP, and activists it helped vault onto the party's provincial board have stepped back from roles with Take Back.
Election finance laws also prevent third-party groups from selling party memberships, being part of a party or candidate's administrative activity, and sharing voter data with parties and candidates.
It's that last rule that Parker acknowledges could have been contravened when Take Back asked supporters if it could share data at that event in April.
The group had been requesting to share supporters' registration data with UCP for at least several weeks, between late March and that videotaped discussion in mid-April.
"Are you willing to let us pass your name on to the local campaign coordinator?" co-organizer Benita Pederson asked the crowd at the March 21 rally in Grande Prairie, referencing the "little boxes" on forms.
Parker said that question on Take Back's forms was a volunteer's error, and data was never handed over to UCP campaigns. He made those reassurances to Elections Alberta as proactive disclosure, he said.
Elections Alberta does not publicly discuss potential rule violations until investigations have concluded.
The UCP has not received any lists from third parties, would not accept them, and have instructed local candidates not to either, a party spokesman wrote in an email.
When asked about Take Back's level of influence, Smith said anyone's welcome to participate in the UCP's one-member, one-vote system. "We've got, I think, a diversity of views on our boards as well as among our candidates, and I welcome that."
NDP Leader Rachel Notley calls Take Back an "extreme group with very, very extreme fringe ideas" with key posts on the UCP executive — shifting that party more to the edges than in Kenney's days in charge. "The UCP now consists of different people with different ideas than what was initially intended," Notley said.
Parker's group is aware of the risk it becomes a liability for the UCP. A message on Take Back's Telegram channel asked all supporters to avoid wearing TBA shirts to UCP events, or discussing the group when interacting with UCP supporters or potential supporters, because "not everybody is friendly to TBA."
Despite the way Take Back has infiltrated senior positions in the party, there is no indication any of its supporters work in the UCP's campaign headquarters or war room, or travel with the leader as she tours — even if Smith was Parker's wedding guest.
There is wariness among party veterans of this group's growing influence, and how they will continue to mobilize and expand this activist wing within the party after the election, win or lose. After all, Take Back has helped push out one party leader before.
Despite her friendship with Parker, Smith would know that he was once a Kenney ally too, and that Take Back may not be afraid of challenging a UCP leader again.
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