In the lead-up to the 2024 United States presidential election, the same claims kept cropping up on social media. They were a hodgepodge of anti-vaccine rhetoric, voter-fraud conspiracies, and lies about the candidates. The posts had two things in common: they were almost impossible to ignore, and they were promoted by a network of influencers across YouTube, Rumble, and other platforms.
To an outside observer, this content and the people behind it might have looked like evidence of a grassroots movement or a groundswell of support. The reality was more sinister. According to the US Department of Justice, much of it was part of a covert campaign to push messages aligned with Russian strategic objectives—specifically, to deepen existing divisions in American society. The scheme operated through Tenet Media, a US-based company that received millions from RT, the Russian state-controlled broadcaster sanctioned by both the US and Canada.
The 2024 election disinformation campaign was far from Moscow’s first foray into illicit political finance. Credible reporting indicates that Russia has engaged in vote buying, bankrolling political parties and candidates, funding propaganda and influence networks, and a host of other (sometimes illegal) activities designed to bolster preferred candidates and shape a political outcome. While Russia is not the only country that does this—India, Iran, and China also use various methods to interfere in the politics of other countries—it is a big player. Since 2014, it has channelled at least $300 million to political parties, officials, and politicians in more than twenty-four countries. And that’s only what we can trace.
Russia’s attention has now turned to Alberta, with potentially destabilizing consequences for Canada. Moscow’s interest in the province is part of a familiar playbook: amplify the angriest arguments inside a Western democracy as evidence that its institutions are weak and divided.
According to research published by Disinfowatch, a group that exposes foreign disinformation campaigns targeting Canada, between late 2025 and early 2026, the Pravda News Network published dozens of stories depicting Alberta as a province systematically exploited by Ottawa. An influence campaign known as Storm 1516 reportedly went further, creating websites such as albertaseparatist.com to circulate fabricated claims—including the assertion that the federal government fleeces $20,000 a year from every Alberta family. Russian state-aligned outlets, like Sputnik and RT, then helped elevate these narratives, alongside inflammatory commentary from sympathetic US influencers on YouTube and X, giving fringe claims the appearance of mainstream debate.
These messages are not always entirely consistent or aligned. Russia is well-known for advancing any divisive narrative and for testing and refining what works and gains traction. The objective is corrosion: to convince Canadians their democracy is irreparably broken and that the country’s internal divisions are deeper than they really are, particularly as Alberta moves toward a referendum.
The re-election of Donald Trump and his fifty-first-state rhetoric have also raised serious concerns with Canadians about foreign interference from our southern neighbour. For instance, earlier this year, US state department officials met with the Alberta Prosperity Project. The group sought a $500 billion (US) line of credit from the US to support Alberta if they were victorious in a referendum, a move that British Columbia premier David Eby called “an act of treason.”
When I worked at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, I learned a very important lesson: there is money behind every threat to the security of Canada. Terrorism requires money, as does the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and foreign interference and transnational repression are no different. When states try to influence political processes, they do so with the full power of the state behind them. This means they use corporate structures, but they also enlist their intelligence agencies, as well as covert operator networks. The trick is figuring out how states are paying for this activity, because if you can cut off the flow of funds, you can seriously limit the amount of damage they can do. Even shining a light on the flow of funds can have important deterrent and messaging effects.
Canada currently has no integrated system for detecting foreign illicit political finance. CSIS, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (or FINTRAC), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and election authorities each play a role, but no single body is responsible for connecting the dots or disrupting these networks before they take hold.
For Canada, the place to start is by strengthening methods for stopping this activity before it is too late. Because once the money has been deployed, the influence soon follows.
In Alberta, separatist advocacy is becoming big business. It is clear from the evidence that the US and Russia are both actively interfering in the referendum process, either through engagement with Alberta separatists, like the Alberta Prosperity Project, or through social media influence campaigns.
Further, analysis from the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University found a network of at least twenty YouTube channels, with nearly 40 million views, all promoting Alberta separatism, but simultaneously found no evidence that they were authentically Albertan. Using AI-generated voices and avatars alongside paid American actors, the videos support exaggerated claims—in one case, that Western provinces had declared moves toward becoming the fifty-first through fifty-sixth US states. While some of this provocative content might have been featured to drive engagement (or “slopaganda”), McGill researchers found that the secession framing, along with US annexation content, “points to political influence as a plausible objective.”
Evidence of “slop” activity should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of illicit political finance. Instead, by blurring the line between legitimate local debate and coordinated foreign manipulation, it creates an environment in which covert money can flow more easily and with less scrutiny. My concern, and what Canadians should also be concerned about, is that there are few mechanisms to identify and intercept illicit political financing in Alberta’s referendum.
In Alberta, most political participants are restricted in who they can accept donations from. Parties, constituency associations, prospective candidates, initiative petition proponents, and political third-party advertisers can generally accept donations only from Alberta residents, Alberta corporations, trade unions, or employee organizations. The timings of these donations are also specified, depending on the political participant.
The Alberta Prosperity Project, a self-described “educational initiative” for a sovereign Alberta, is not registered with Elections Alberta as a political participant and therefore has no filing requirements and faces no legal restrictions on accepting foreign donations. APP has received over a million dollars in donations; when asked by Jen Gerson of The Line, they refused to disclose the identities of their donors.
