Politicians exhale after 5-year probe of UCP leadership race nets no charges
Friday's Alberta RCMP news conference often seemed more about clearing the Mounties than the UCP.
After nearly five years of investigating alleged fraud and identity theft in the 2017 UCP leadership campaign, investigators charged no one with anything.
The findings will fuel more suspicion that the force didn't take this seriously and hoped to stall until it all faded away.
But the Mounties say they worked their badges off for years. They just didn't talk about it.
Supt. Rick Jané, who headed the probe, said there was deep and detailed inquiry into thousands of digital and financial records, voting methods and individuals.
Just about everybody of stature in the UCP was grilled by the Mounties. After the inquiry started, in fact, it was odd to find someone involved in that campaign who wasn't interviewed.
That included Jason Kenney, the campaign winner who would go on to become Alberta premier, and now former premier.
“Today's statement by the RCMP confirms categorically what I have said all along: there was no wrongdoing on the part of me or my 2017 UCP leadership campaign,” Kenney said Friday on X, formerly Twitter.
“The outcome is a total vindication of my 2017 leadership campaign, and the UCP'S administration of that campaign.”
Kenney added: “Obviously ridiculous bad faith complaints led to a string of defamatory accusations, and a five-year-long RCMP investigation involving dozens of officers.”
Jané said 65 officers worked on the case. They ran up $461,000 for travel and overtime. The full expense was surely much higher.
But the senior officer said the public got good value. He urged Albertans to judge the Mounties on the rigour of the work, not the outcome.
“The lack of criminal charges should not be the test of a successful investigation,” he said.
“In investigating allegations of criminality, the thoroughness and completeness of the investigation is the standard that should be assessed.”
After the mountain of evidence was examined, Mounties found no behaviour that rose to the level of either fraud or identity theft.
Some still won't believe that. But, really, we don't want police charging people just because some politicians and media hope they do.
It's also a long, unfair stretch to imagine the RCMP covering up, especially when the heat of those charges has died and key players are no longer in politics.
But the Mounties helped create their own image problem with their extreme secrecy about such investigations.
They said hardly a word to show they were conducting a major probe. The silence bred suspicion that the political fix was in.
Many accusations and inquiries came out of that fight for leadership of a new conservative party, including Elections Alberta findings of funding irregularities.
Candidate Jeff Callaway faced fines of $70,000 before the courts said those amounts should be reviewed.
But the Mounties didn't deal with that issue, judging that it didn't involve crimes.
They found only two matters that could justify charges.
The allegation that Callaway fraudulently raised money when he never intended to compete or win, only to switch his support to Kenney for the leadership.
And the claim that there was widespread identity theft through voting electronically with the IDS of individuals who weren't aware.
On the Callaway matter, Jané said, “Alberta RCMP investigators conducted more than 170 interviews with contributors and campaign staff and examined over 25,000 related emails.
“Following this thorough investigation, we did not uncover evidence to establish that Callaway or any other person committed a criminal offence.”
The identity fraud investigation proved insanely complex.
Out of more than 60,000 votes cast, the investigators found only 200 deemed questionable. The Mounties conducted 1,200 interviews related to those ballots, according to Jané.
In the end, “there was insufficient evidence to charge any suspect. And again, there was no evidence that any leadership candidate orchestrated these relatively rare instances.”
The RCMP isn't claiming this campaign was a model of political purity; only that crimes can't be identified or proven even after a long investigation supervised by Ontario's prosecution service.
No vote fixing is acceptable. But in these times, it's actually reassuring that only 200 of 60,000 ballots were crooked.
And some real good did come out of the investigation. It scared the hell out of a lot of politicians.
The party leadership review vote that pushed out Kenney was squeaky clean. So was the subsequent contest that chose Danielle Smith as leader.
We shouldn't need five years of expensive RCMP work to implant rectitude. But it's something.