The UCP says it wants Alberta in Canada. Its donors are paying to take it out.

Data as of October 1, 2026. Elections Alberta’s weekly filings cover March 31 to September 24. The dashboard is at https://chadohman.github.io/alberta-referendum-money/ and updates as filings land.

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Danielle Smith says she will vote to keep Alberta in Canada. Her caucus says it stands for “a strong and sovereign Alberta within a united Canada.” Fine. Let’s look at who is actually paying for the campaign to leave.

Groups file contributions with Elections Alberta for the Oct. 19 referendum, and they must list fiancial donations over $250. I matched these names against every itemized donation to an Alberta political party since 2010 and every federal donation since 2004. This time, the question is simple. Specifically, among the funders on both sides, who funded the UCP that funded the Ottawa convoy?

The receipts

	Yes (separate)	No (remain)
Named donors (gifts over $250)	561	259
Named donors who have given to the UCP	167 (30%)	36 (14%)
Of those, gave to the UCP in 2025 or 2026	102	19
Referendum money from UCP donors	$180,916 (30% of the side’s named money)	$63,407 (17%)
What those donors have given the UCP since 2017	$475,646	$163,877
Named donors who ever gave to an Alberta independence party	22 (4%)	0

Among referendum donors with a UCP giving record, 82% funded the Yes side. Count only the people who wrote the UCP a cheque in 2025 or 2026, and it is 102 to 19, more than five to one. The people who keep the UCP’s lights on are, when they open their wallets for this referendum, overwhelmingly paying to start the process of leaving Canada.

This is not the old separatist fringe

The comfortable story is that the Yes campaign is the Wildrose Independence crowd, people who were always going to vote to leave. The filings say otherwise. Only 22 Yes donors have ever given to any of Alberta’s four independence parties. 167 have given to the UCP. For every donor the Yes side draws from the independence parties, it draws more than seven from the UCP.

Look at the groups. Let Alberta Decide, Keith Wilson’s PAC, has raised $548,000 on its own, almost as much as the entire No side. 127 of its 347 named donors (37%) are UCP donors, and they supplied 38% of its named money. Pathway to Independence, Cory Morgan’s group: 36% UCP donors. Alberta’s Choice, the Rebel News campaign: six of its thirteen named donors.

The federal picture is the same. Pierre Poilievre is on the record for staying, and three of his Calgary MPs put their own money into No groups. His party’s donors in Alberta are funding Yes nearly four to one: 254 Yes donors have given to the Conservative Party of Canada, against 67 on the No side.

The caucus has not put in a dollar

I checked every sitting MLA, every Alberta MP and Senator, and former Premiers, Ministers and party leaders against the filings. The UCP caucus and Cabinet are absent from both sides. Not one has given to a No group over $250 so far.

Others have. Greg McLean, Pat Kelly and David McKenzie, three Calgary Conservative MPs, gave to Canadian Patriots, the group fronted by their colleague Dane Lloyd, who gave $1,000 to it himself. Corey Hogan, Calgary’s lone Liberal MP, gave $1,000 to Alberta’s Voice. The UCP’s own alumni are in the data too. Travis Toews, Jason Kenney’s finance minister, gave $3,000 to Vote to Stay. Monte Solberg also gave $5,000 to Vote to Stay, which he fronts, where Tyler Shandro is the financial officer and former Premier Jason Kenney is an advisor. Jim Dinning, a former PC treasurer, also gave Vote to Stay $1,500. Thomas Lukaszuk, Deputy Premier under Alison Redford, runs Forever Canadian.

So the Conservatives who have left public service are paying to keep Canada together. The Conservatives in office are not. The one UCP MLA who has said how he voted, Red Deer-South’s Jason Stephan, told CBC on October 1 that he chose Option 2 “because I want Ottawa to be compelled to fix the things that are broken.” In February, CTV counted 19 UCP MLAs, eight of them cabinet ministers, on the Republican Party of Alberta’s list of independence supporters. Jobs Minister Joseph Schow said he never signed the petition. The other eighteen did not answer. When asked about Stephan, the premier said: “We have a big-tent party. And big tent means that different MLAs are able to express different views.”

The UCP is a big tent with separatists inside it, but the money is only flowing one way.

How the question got on the ballot

In May 2025, the government passed Bill 54. Before it, a citizen petition on a constitutional question needed signatures from 20% of eligible voters, roughly 600,000 names. After it, the requirement dropped to 10% of the votes cast at the last general election: 177,732. The bill also gave petitioners 120 days instead of 90 and lifted the ban on corporate and union money in petition campaigns. The separatist petition that followed cleared the new bar with about 223,000 valid signatures. It would not have come close to the former criteria.

On May 13 of this year, a Court of King’s Bench judge quashed Elections Alberta’s approval of the separatist petition because the province had not consulted the First Nations whose treaties it would affect. Danielle Smith called the ruling “incorrect in law and anti-democratic.” A week later, the UCP majority on the Legislative Committee reviewing Thomas Lukaszuk’s pro-Canada petition, which had more than 400,000 verified signatures, moved to recommend that Cabinet put a separation question to voters. The next evening, Smith announced Question 10 in a taxpayer-paid televised address: “It’s time to have a vote, understand the will of Albertans on this subject, and move on.”

Neither petition’s question made the ballot. The question that did is the UCP’s own. And when the UCP then spent $4 million advertising the referendum, the UCP’s own President complained in public that the Premier had assured him the messaging on Question 10 would be “as NEUTRAL as possible.” Smith replied that she is “not a neutral party in this.” Her party President evidently expected her to be.

The Convoy connection runs through the UCP

One in eight Yes donors is on the leaked 2022 GiveSendGo list of Freedom Convoy donors (67 of 560). On the No side, one person gave $10. This list is presented in aggregate only, and I will never name anyone on it, though I have that data from DDoSecrets, including photos of driver’s licenses and other personally identifiable information.

Among Yes donors with a UCP giving record, the rate is one in five (34 of 167). Among Yes donors without one, it is one in twelve. The convoy overlap in this referendum is not a separate fringe. It sits inside the UCP’s donor base. The wider picture agrees: 700 of Alberta’s 7,395 convoy donors are itemized UCP donors, and together they have given the party about $1.3 million.

The No side is everyone else

The No campaign is a coalition. Four in ten of its donors have given to the NDP, the Liberals or the Alberta Party. One in five has given to the UCP, the PCs or Wildrose. A quarter have given to the federal Conservatives. It has the NDP’s base, Calgary’s MPs from both federal parties, the PC-era cabinet, the unions and the faculty associations.

The Yes campaign is a faction: UCP donors, federal Conservative and People’s Party donors, and 198 people who had never given to a party before.

The polling says the same thing. A Janet Brown Opinion Research survey reported by CBC found UCP voters split 53 to 40 in favour of Option 2, while 98% of NDP voters will vote to remain. Ipsos has Albertans overall at 70% for staying. The only large group in the province that leans toward leaving is the governing party’s own voters.

What this means on October 19

The UCP cannot have it both ways. It lowered the bar for the petition, revived the question when a court struck it down, wrote the ballot wording, bought the ads, and tolerates a caucus that signs separatist petitions and votes Option 2. Its donors fund the Yes campaign five-to-one. Danielle Smith claims she is voting to stay, and that’s great… But a party is its money and its members, and this party’s money and members are on the other side.

Vote Option 1 and no to the nine other questions.

What the data can and cannot say

• Every match is by name and municipality. Tier A is the same name in the same municipality or postal code; Tier B is within 30 km or a nickname variant in the same place. I count A and B only. A scored sample came out 93% right for Tier A and 73% for Tier B, with the rest unsure. Name-only matches are never counted.
• Only gifts over $250 are named. Someone who gives under $200 a year is invisible here, and so is every small gift to a campaign group. Small gifts make up 39% of the Yes side’s money and 32% of the No side’s.
• Four corporate contributors on the Yes side look odd on the Alberta corporate registry: two struck corporations and two trade names. Whether that matters under Alberta’s rules is Elections Alberta’s call, not mine. Thanks to The Battle for Alberta for this data.

Using this data

You can explore the data used for this article here. It does not, and will not, show who donated to the Ottawa convoy, but will show links to the rest of the data in my data lake. I will continue to update it as Elections Alberta publishes their weekly updates.

The data is classified in three tiers: Class A, B, and C. Class A and B are the most reliable matches, however, you can include Class C matches using the button at the top left of the dashboard. My methodology is described under the “How this works” tab.

Requests for more information on the GiveSendGo convoy data will go unanswered. I was provided this data under privilege for research use like this, and if you want access, I encourage you to reach out to DDoSecrets directly.

The dashboard and analysis are mine. Viewing, linking and citing a figure with attribution are fine. For media, political and commercial use, republication or embedding, you need my permission first. Email me: [email protected].

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