The unaccountable War Room should be defunded and disbanded.

The Canadian Energy Centre has been collecting the personal information from Albertans in petitions about topics ranging from Bigfoot cartoons to Jane Fonda. There is no clear reason why.
There are two reasons public affairs entities typically collect email addresses: to solicit donations and encourage voting. Since the War Room continues to be funded by taxpayers, it doesn’t require donations and should not be soliciting votes.

The War Room was setup as a private entity to avoid having to respond to Freedom of Information requests. And its board is solely made up of UCP politicians who give it direction in private. Now the War Room appears to be undertaking political organization. That is highly suspicious. Especially since it is in the hands of a party still under RCMP investigation for voting irregularities.
It isn’t enough for publicly funded institutions to be innocent of wrongdoing. They also need to appear to be above reproach. And the War Room is failing miserably to do that. Albertans deserve clear explanation about why the war room is collecting personal information, how it will be protected, and what exactly it will be used for.

Acting Leader Jacquie Fenske,

“The war room has ended up being a waste of taxpayer money. They attack cartoons when they should be focused on Jane Fonda and her protest to prohibit upgrading line 3. When they finally turn their attention to line 3 it’s a petition to collect your personal information. Jane Fonda and thousands of Americans aren’t going to react to a petition, but someone else might find your information useful. We just want to know why it is being collected.”

The War Room has been an embarrassing misuse of tax dollars. It should be defunded and disbanded. To insure its publicly funded work isn’t being misappropriated for partisan gain, all personal information collected by it should be destroyed.