Alberta separatism leader owned firm behind ‘jaw-dropper’ poll

As a political force, the broader Alberta separatist movement certainly has. Just last week, Premier Danielle Smith told Prime Minister Mark Carney that a new pipeline could quell any push to exit Alberta.

The party touted the poll online. Local news outlets reported on the Republican upswing found by the September survey. At the national level, polling analyst Éric Grenier pointed out in his newsletter, the Writ, that this was the first time any poll had shown significant support for the Alberta Republicans, saying it might help put Cardinal Research on the map. The results, he said, were “a bit of a jaw-dropper.”

But as the poll has made waves, neither Cardinal Research nor the Republican Party of Alberta told the public they share DNA.

The common link is Cameron Davies, a longtime conservative political operative who was named leader of the Alberta Republican Party this spring. He had an ownership stake in the same polling company that reported support for his new party was surging.

Corporate filings show the name Cardinal Research was registered in August 2024 — before Davies became leader of the party — as a brand name of one of his companies, Sovereign North Strategies.

In a phone call with the Star, Davies said the Alberta poll was released “long after any professional relationship” he had with Cardinal had ended, noting that he had sold his stake in the company several months ago.

“We had no influence over the questions, the timing or the conduction of this poll whatsoever,” he said, adding that it would “be quite a stretch to claim some sort of undue process.”

Davies said that prior to the sale, he was only “loosely involved” with Cardinal and played no role in Cardinal Research’s surveys. Those operations were led, Davies said, by a “very sharp gentleman” named Curtis Fric, Cardinal’s Ontario-based lead researcher and the public face of the polling firm.

In an earlier interview with the Star, Fric had denied any connection between Cardinal Research and Davies or the Alberta Republican Party. He did not answer followup questions about the apparent discrepancy between his account and the one later given by Davies.

The other Sovereign North director listed in corporate records, Brittany Marsh, has the same name as someone who was recently the president of the Republican Party of Alberta. Marsh did not respond to a LinkedIn message seeking comment.

In the interview on Oct. 1, Davies said Sovereign North sold the Cardinal Research brand name three months ago. He declined to provide documentation of the sale or any information about Cardinal’s new owner, citing legal advice.

When asked why Alberta’s corporate registry showed no evidence of a sale, Davies chalked it up to a delay at the registry. A spokesperson for Service Alberta, which oversees the registry, said in an email that when a new filing is submitted, changes show up “right away.” The registry now shows the Cardinal Research trade name was disbanded Oct. 2, the day after the Star spoke to Davies.

In emails sent a week later, Davies appeared to attempt to walk back his statements acknowledging his connections with Cardinal Research. 

“We have never operated under that trade name. I misspoke and was corrected by our legal team.” Davies said. “The trade name was formally dissolved once it was brought to our attention that it remained active in the registry.”

Polls can do more than just reflect public opinion — they can also shape it. They influence how journalists cover the political landscape, help voters assess the popularity of candidates and ideas and are used by politicians to decide the timing of elections or prove their party is worthy of votes and donations.

Political parties looking to keep their finger on the pulse often hire pollsters to privately assess public opinion. Many prominent pollsters have also spent time working for one political party or another. But it’s unusual for the head of a party to personally own or have recently owned a polling company, and for the survey firm to release polls publicly without disclosing that connection.

Jon Pammett, an expert in public opinion polling and political science professor at Carleton University, said surveys conducted by pollsters with partisan ties can be legitimate, but those connections should be disclosed.

“You’re right to be more skeptical the closer the organization doing the polling is to the organization being polled,” Pammett said.

“The more secretive that becomes, then the more ethical problems arise.”

Fric did not answer questions about why Cardinal did not publicly disclose its connection with Davies and his party.

Davies first rose to prominence in Alberta politics for his role in a scheme alleged to have unfolded during the leadership race of the newly-forged United Conservative Party in 2017.

Jason Kenney, at the time a former federal Conservative minister, was on a mission to merge the province’s two right wing parties, become the leader of the new United Conservatives and dethrone Rachel Notley’s NDP. Kenney won that race, fending off a challenge from popular rival MLA Brian Jean.

But after the fact, Elections Alberta launched an investigation into “irregularities” in the United Conservative leadership campaign. Among them were allegations that senior members of Kenney’s campaign had directed another candidate to sling mud at Jean so Kenney didn’t have to, and that the effort had involved illegal donations.

A key player in that alleged ‘kamikaze’ campaign? Cameron Davies.

The UCP would go on to win the next election and Kenney became premier, while Davies — described by Elections Alberta as the co-campaign manager for the stalking horse candidate — continued to deal with the fallout. The Alberta Election Commissioner fined him for eight separate violations related to illicit donations and obstructing an investigation.

He told CBC that he had only ended up handling those donations because of a last minute request from someone he “trusted and respected.” According to Elections Alberta, all of Davies’ fines — a total of $27,000 — were paid in April.

The relationship between Davies and Kenney broke down, and speaking on a podcast in 2022, Davies objected to the idea that he had a lingering reputation as a political “assassin.” He said that while he’d taken on political projects that were “perhaps outside the realm of what would otherwise be deemed as civil,” his real passion was building new political projects.

Davies was initially supportive of current Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who he said he helped elect after Kenney resigned in 2022. But in April, Davies publicly announced he was quitting the UCP, which he said had become “bloated, dishonest and corrupted by entitlement.” Less than a week later, the Republican Party of Alberta announced him as its new leader.

The party has attempted to ride a wave of simmering separatism that, since the re-election of a Liberal federal government last spring, has morphed into a powerful political force in Alberta — one Smith has used to advance her own policy goals but struggled to control.

One survey released by pollster Angus Reid in May found more than half of those who cast votes for Smith’s UCP would now opt to leave Canada or are leaning that way, though separatist sentiment remains a minority opinion in the province at large. The Republican Party of Alberta, seeking to capitalize on that movement, has tried to position itself as the party of choice for UCP voters seeking to separate.

Smith has been adamant that she is not in favour of separating. Soon after the election, she removed her shoe to waggle her Canada-red pedicure at a room of conference attendees, saying, “I’m Team Canada right down to my toes.” But she’s also made it easier for Albertans to put a referendum question on the ballot and continued to rail against Ottawa.

Alberta’s next provincial election isn’t scheduled until 2027, but the Republican Party of Alberta ran candidates — including Davies himself — in three by-elections in June. In two ridings in left-leaning Edmonton, the party captured less than a per cent of the vote in one and 3.4 per cent of the vote in a second. In a third rural riding where Davies ran, the party netted 18 per cent.

Though the Cardinal poll showing 11 per cent support for Davies’ party was surprising to some, Fric told the Star the results were along the lines of what he would have expected.

“Where [the Alberta Republicans] really shine is in rural Alberta, which is, you know, kind of entirely what we expected the case to have been,” Fric said.

Fric has been Cardinal’s lead researcher since the firm launched in 2024. It was his first time holding such a senior role.

Before that, he had spent three years as a social media manager for established polling firm Mainstreet Research, ran for the Ontario NDP in the 2018 election at the age of 20 and worked for one of the party’s MPPs.

Fric also runs popular X account Polling Canada — and an American equivalent — whose posts about new surveys are followed and reposted by journalists and politicos. He also writes blog posts for popular polling aggregator 338Canada, whose election forecasts are referenced by media and as a tool for advocates of strategic voting.

It’s not clear how Fric and Davies crossed paths, and Fric did not answer when asked how he came to work at Cardinal Research.

Davies told the Star he and Fric share “very few political beliefs.”

“To say that we’re ideologically aligned would be the misstatement of the year,” Davies said.

When it was released in September, Cardinal’s Alberta poll didn’t set off red flags for Grenier of the Writ. New pollsters are always treated with skepticism, he says.

But elections are the only real test of a pollster’s accuracy, he says, and Cardinal had “okay results” in some recent provincial races and their methodology in Alberta seemed reasonable, Grenier said. Their results also seemed “plausible,” given the RPA’s showing in recent byelections.

Grenier worked on CBC’s Poll Tracker for the 2025 federal election and included a Cardinal survey in the model. CBC spokesperson Chuck Thompson said the broadcaster only adds polls to its tracker if they were commissioned by media outlets or independently self-commissioned by polling firms, and that it weights them based on the track record of the pollster.

“Polls commissioned by political parties, interest groups or advocacy organizations are excluded,” Thompson said in an email. “Irrespective of any ownership ties, this poll met that criteria.”

Thompson did not answer when asked whether CBC will include Cardinal’s polls in the future.

The polling aggregator 338Canada included the firm’s first public Alberta poll in its provincial projections in September 2024, a month after Cardinal launched. The site has since included Cardinal’s polls in its projections for the last federal election, and campaigns in Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia.

Phillippe J. Fournier, the editor in chief of 338Canada, told the Star he was aware of Cardinal Research’s connection to Davies and scrutinizes its polls accordingly. 338Canada gives the firm a relatively low rating, which means its results sway the site’s projections less than other pollsters.

“If I see that the numbers are trying to not measure the narrative, but drive the narrative, I would certainly call them out,” Fournier said, adding that he hasn’t seen reason to distrust Cardinal’s work so far. The firm’s finding of higher levels of support for the Alberta Republican Party was “maybe a tad high, but it’s not implausible,” he said, noting that it hasn’t been confirmed by other pollsters yet.

“I know Curtis (Fric), and he told me ‘I’m the one doing the numbers, and nobody else.’ And so his word was good enough for me, because I’ve known him online for years, and we spoke on the phone a few times. He’s extremely diligent with his work.”

In recent weeks, Cardinal Research has also released polls about mayoral elections playing out in the fall in Calgary and Edmonton.