Activist group Take Back Alberta and founder fined $120K by elections agency

Elections Alberta has fined the conservative activist group Take Back Alberta and founder David Parker more $120,000 for political financing violations.

The fines, disclosed on the election agency’s website Tuesday, are for more than a dozen violations of Alberta’s election finance law, including circumventing spending limits, accepting contributions from outside Alberta and Canada, and knowingly making false statements in a financial report to the chief electoral officer.

The agency does not release the reasons for its penalties, or comment on them.

But Parker told CBC News that investigators disagreed with his insistence that his group’s meetings and his speeches about the United Conservative Party (UCP) and NDP throughout Alberta didn’t amount to political advertising.

“If I can’t express my dislike for a political figure at my own meetings from my own group, that is word-of-mouth advertised, then we don’t live in a democracy anymore,” Parker said Tuesday in an interview.

The group and its founder have 30 days to pay the fines, or they have the option of appealing in court. Parker said he’ll fight the penalties but hasn’t yet decided how he’ll do that.

TBA has emerged in recent years as a potent activist movement within the UCP. 

Parker, a former federal and provincial party organizer, helped encourage disaffected Albertans to push then-premier Jason Kenney out of the UCP leadership in 2022. He then rallied party members to elect like-minded activists to the UCP board of directors so TBA could have “control” over the governing party.

Parker has been politically and personally close with Premier Danielle Smith, who was a guest at his 2023 wedding. But she had cut ties after some of his inflammatory social media remarks, and he campaigned against her UCP leadership review last fall, where she won resounding support. 

TBA is registered as a political and election third-party advertiser, a designation that allows it to promote and oppose provincial parties and candidates, but also requires it to report its donations and donor names for all such activities. 

The group and Parker, its chief financial officer, had not submitted financial reports in 2023 or 2024, according to the Elections Alberta financial portal, despite Parker’s many speaking events and advocacy efforts within the UCP.

 “My claim is we did no political advertising. Their claim is the town halls were political advertising,” Parker said Tuesday.

“Nobody who gave money to Take Back Alberta was donating to political advertising. They were under the assumption they were donating to operations.”

Elections Alberta found that Parker knowingly contributed over the $30,000 annual limit to his own third-party advertiser.

His organization landed in court last year, as Parker had resisted disclosing documents Elections Alberta had demanded as part of an investigation into financial irregularities. 

The Edmonton Journal reported that he was fined $5,000 plus legal costs in August after failing to meet a deadline to disclose donor names to the agency.

In a letter to TBA supporters last summer, Parker said the group had $680,000 in revenues in 2023 and $688,225 in 2022 — although that year the group reported only $22,309 in contributions. 

In July, Parker called the Elections Alberta investigation a “witch hunt by unelected bureaucrats” in a social media post.

Parker was personally fined $7,500, while the group Take Back Alberta was fined $112,500. Jonathan Heidebrecht, the group’s former chief financial officer, was fined $500 for a false statement in a quarterly financial report.