When the Christian Right comes to Canada – It’s been there all along

Kristin Du Mez on Substack – Oct 04, 2026

The Globe and Mail broke this story recently, and it’s been all over my Canadian friends’ social media feeds: the report of US Trump supporters working with the Alberta separatist movement to build a database to secure enough votes to bring about the province’s secession. Alberta would then be welcomed with open arms by the Trump administration—or at least its resources would be. The path to statehood would be trickier, but nothing would be stopping independent Albertans from offering access to water and oil to their neighbor to the south.

There is much that is deeply unsettling in this reporting for Canadians: US efforts to undermine Canadian sovereignty and hand over natural resources to Trump and his cronies, not to mention the privacy breaches in taking voter lists and making sensitive personal data available to anyone with basic hacking abilities, as The Globe and Mail discovered.

But as a US American, it was also unsettling to read this piece, as several of the names were all too familiar.

First, the voter data system was pitched by two conservative Christians from Grand Rapids, Michigan: Drew Born and Drew Wierda.

Born, the Globe writes, is “a hunter, outdoorsman and commercial real estate agent in Grand Rapids,” and “the stepson of J.C. Huizenga, a wealthy Republican donor and founder of National Heritage academies, a network of conservative charter schools in the U.S.”

Wierda “is the nephew of Erik Prince, who founded and ran the private military contractor Blackwater before it was sold to investors in 2010, and Betsy DeVos, the education secretary during Mr. Trump’s first term.”

Here’s more on what they were up to:

The pitch began with a prayer…

Gregory Hartzler, a financial consultant to the Alberta Prosperity Project, attended the gathering and recalled the American attendees as affable fellows in casual clothes. “They could have gone and played nine – they would have been perfectly fine.”

David Parker, an organizer for Alberta separation, brokered the meeting and championed the software. Known as 10X Votes, it mines voter lists to identify communities of like-minded people that could be mobilized to potentially swing elections.

“I was blown away by what this can do,” Mr. Parker told a separatist meeting in Edmonton in April, according to video footage of the presentation, where he demonstrated a version adapted for use in Alberta.

He called it “the most effective way I have ever come across to win a campaign.”

His movement needed a boost. The separatist cause has never made a sustained push past 30 per cent support.

For Mr. Parker, the software was the path to victory – one that ultimately resulted in a massive privacy breach involving the sensitive personal data of nearly three million Albertans. The breach raised alarms inside Canada’s security agencies, according to a classified document obtained by The Globe and Mail.

But Mr. Parker’s embrace of the Michigan delegation is evidence of something else – a pattern: separatist factions in Alberta eager to engage the U.S. in their plans for secession, and American actors willing to assist, either privately or openly.

A Globe and Mail investigation has found that Republican political operatives were on the ground in Alberta this year to assist the separatist campaign in its bid to leave Canada, while harbouring their own aspirations for the province to secede.

The Globe also found that when Alberta separatist leaders went to Washington to meet with the U.S. State Department, they offered up key assets from the province’s resource portfolio, including access to fresh water and royalties on crude oil, in exchange for help transitioning to independence.

Through interviews with The Globe on both sides of the border, people involved in politics, the corporate sector and Alberta’s pursuit of separatism have described persistent efforts by figures in the U.S. administration and conservative political establishment to support groups seeking American expansionism and independence for Alberta….

And here’s more on how things work:

The strategy behind 10X Votes is simple, but powerful, the creators say. If MAGA conservatives can identify those within their ranks who aren’t regular voters and get them to the polls, they can generate better election results. It is an age-old get-out-the-vote strategy, but with a technological twist.

By downloading vast tracts of data from state voter lists and pairing them with other data sets, such as demographic information, religious affiliation, or even known magazine subscriptions, 10X Votes gives its users a way to crawl the voter list for people who would likely vote Republican.

“We have 783,000 hunting licences sold roughly every year in the state of Michigan, 330,000 of them don’t vote,” Mr. Born told a meeting of Republicans in 2024, according to a video of the proceeding, adding that there were 1.7 million conservatives in the state who didn’t vote regularly.

“So what we did is we took that list of 1.7 million people and we made it public for you guys – semi-public.”

If every Michigan Republican found 10 like-minded contacts who weren’t regular voters and got them to the polls, it would be like multiplying their vote by 10, hence the name.

Mr. Born said even prominent Republicans such as Pete Hoekstra, former chair of the Michigan Republican Party and current U.S. ambassador to Canada, had members of his family who weren’t voting, according to the software.

“We need our people to turn out and we’ll never lose again,” Mr. Born said.

One (of many) problems here is that the data was not secure. Although representatives claimed the data was no different from what could be found in the phone book and that it was secure, this was not the case.

The Globe and Mail, which registered for the Centurion Project using a company e-mail address, discovered a security vulnerability that gave users access to the main directory that the whole system was based on.

Read the whole article for all the damning details, and don’t miss the brief appearance of none other than Doug Wilson—one of the voices in and around the Trump administration calling for Alberta independence:

Doug Wilson, an influential Christian nationalist pastor who has been invited to the Pentagon by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, said earlier this year that Alberta independence would be “wonderful.” Mr. Wilson leads a conservative Reformed Christian denomination that has several churches in Alberta – in Coaldale, Cochrane and Grande Prairie – some of them led by pastors who have expressed support for secession.

Why would Doug Wilson show up in a story like this?

As I describe in Live Laugh Love, Doug Wilson’s mom, Elizabeth Catherine “Bessie” Dodds Wilson, attended the Prairie Bible Institute in Alberta. (So did Elisabeth Elliot, and Janette Oke almost did, but her acceptance letter was held up in the mail.) PBI was a North American hub of the Keswick holiness movement that ends up being one of the central threads in the book, and, I argue, in the making of modern evangelicalism—particularly forms that are compatible with the high control teachings of fundamentalism/Christian Reconstructionism. Wilson himself is of course no stranger to R. J. Rushdoony’s Reconstructionist teachings, and he’s placed himself in front of the “Christian nationalist” bandwagon so easily these days because he’s been drawing on Christian Reconstructionist teachings for decades.

As historian Darren Dochuk has shown in his magisterial Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America, Alberta has its own homegrown Christian right. Dochuk is an Edmonton native and current chair of the History Department at the University of Notre Dame, and his focus on oil barons inspired by right-wing Christianity who in turn funded right-wing religious movements on both sides of the border—the Albertan Tar Sands play a central role in the book.

It’s no surprise, then, that the right-wing secessionist movement in Canada happens to be located in Alberta. And also no surprise that they’d have connections to the Christian Right on this side of the border.

What is the end game? Would Alberta become the 51st state?

I can’t say for sure what the ultimate end game is for all involved, but more immediately, the Trump administration’s goals seem to be gaining access to resources and weakening its former-ally-now-rival, Canada.

Beyond that, my sense is that “Christian nationalism” may not be the right word for what we’re witnessing. Rather than bringing entire nations under their control, I think key architects of this plan may be content simply to control access to resources, and then dividing populations into compliant network states. (Think of Moscow, Idaho, as a prototype, or Peter Thiel’s privatized city-states, while leaving the less compliant to fend for themselves.) Rough historical precedents include the South African homeland model, or restricting Native Americans to reservations. So, for at least some who get labeled “Christian nationalists,” nationalism isn’t necessarily the ultimate goal. Regardless of the ultimate goal, however, the intermediate steps are the same: weaken modern liberal nation states, secure access to resources, and use any means necessary to gain the votes needed to seize and keep power, until votes are no longer required.

In the meantime, in the words of Mark Carney, elbows up, Canadian friends.

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