Foreign interference in Alberta? Premier Smith weighs in

Premier Danielle Smith sat down with Focus Punjabi on Omni TV and warned that Alberta’s independence movement may be amplified by bot farms with possible links to Russia. She cited security briefings from CSIS and the RCMP as her sources, noting that nothing had risen to the level of criminal activity.

On Wednesday’s Buffalo Roundtable livestream, the panel raised some questions about the premier’s comments.

Sheila Gunn Reid, Lise Merle, and Cory Morgan all noted the same thing: both CSIS and the RCMP have ***ly said they are not seeing foreign interference in the Alberta independence debate.

“She stressed that people should check their sources and verify information,” Lise said, “and then quotes the RCMP and CSIS as her source, calling the federal police force and intel agency “discredited” after years of incorporating diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

Cory said Premier Smith referred to both agencies, “but if you look at any official communications that have come out of them, both have said there isn’t any foreign interference.”  Instead, all the RCMP and CSIS have said is, “we’re watching for it.”

Smith also cited a group called Cipher — which Sheila described as a university think tank app that scrapes the internet and flags what it believes may be foreign bot activity. It is not a federal security agency. “I imagine if this Cipher group found anything of substance,” Sheila said, “they would forward it.”

Cory noted the CBC had done an extensive investigation into alleged foreign interference in the independence campaign and the best evidence they could produce was a noodle vendor in Indonesia who made $14 on Facebook.

“If they could find a smoking gun, they’d be all over it,” he said. The same alleged bot farms, he added, are also pushing *** sites and Temu — they are not pro-Alberta activists, they are traffic-seeking accounts that will amplify anything. “They’re agnostic about what they push,” he said.

Sheila pointed out the absurdity of the framing. “Russia managed to go back in time and convince my grandfather that separatism was the way to go,” she said. The suggestion that three-generation Alberta separatists are being manipulated by foreign actors is, in her view, deeply insulting to the people who make up the independence movement.

She also noted that Palestinian separatists organizing a referendum on Canadian soil — with far more doblockented terrorist ties — generated virtually no similar concern from the same officials now alarmed about Indonesian noodle vendors.

The Buffalo Roundtable airs Wednesdays at 11 a.m. MT / 1 p.m. ET.