Former backroom political staffer takes centre stage in Take Back Alberta movement – National Post

Article content

This is a conversation series by Donna Kennedy-Glans, a writer and former Alberta cabinet minister, featuring newsmakers and intriguing personalities. This week, she speaks with Take Back Alberta’s David Parker.

David Parker, the de facto leader of the Take Back Alberta movement, relies on his truck to get around and spread the word. But on the bitterly cold day we’re set to meet — at the Last Straw pub in one of Calgary’s northwest suburbs — the starter on David Parker’s truck goes kaput and he’s a no-show.

Article content

Article content

Once arrangements are made to tow his F-150 to a garage, David re-emerges, inviting me to a Zoom call to find out what’s under the hood of this 34-year-old politico’s crusade. Last November, at the United Conservative Party’s (UCP’s) annual general meeting, Take Back Alberta elected their “freedom fighters” into all eighteen UCP board seats. Now, they’ve set their sites on getting members elected to school boards.

“I was a Stephen Harper storm trooper. I was a capital ‘C’ ideologue conservative. But I’m not anymore,” David responds when I inquire about the ontology that drives him. “Are you libertarian?” I ask this serious young man dressed in a dark hoodie on the computer screen in front of me. “The best way to describe my political philosophy is I’m a decentralist,” David explains, “I believe in localism. I believe we need to take power away from institutions.”

Take Back Alberta and the Freedom Convoy were movements birthed by vaccine mandates during the COVID epidemic and while David claims he was one hundred per cent supportive of the convoy, he wasn’t involved. Instead, he was busy criss-crossing Alberta, educating the disaffected “on what they could do about getting rid of (then-premier Jason) Kenney because of what he did about vaccines,” he said.

Article content

Article content

“I worked for Harper; I worked for Rona Ambrose; Shelly Glover. I was Erin O’Toole’s national director of field operations for his leadership race,” David shares. “I was a pretty run-of-the-mill conservative, until the last three years.” Now, David claims thousands of followers. In the last two years, he’s delivered over 240 speeches to rooms as small as seven people and as large as a thousand. This former backroom political staffer has become the show.

I always had this — my wife calls it a messianic complex

David’s father is an evangelical minister and his mother, also a faithful Christian, is a homeschool facilitator. As a kid “home-schooled in rural Alberta 20 kilometres from the nearest gas station,” he boasts having memorized the entire book of Romans, word for word and to have read the Bible end to end over a dozen times. The arrests of evangelical pastors for holding religious services during COVID lockdowns was the line in the sand for him; it violated his understanding of religious freedom.

“I always had this — my wife calls it a messianic complex,” David shares, pausing briefly. “Perhaps. But I always had the idea to be great.” And COVID provided him with a breakthrough opportunity.

Article content

“In my boyish, childhood mind … I wanted to be a great knight, a general, a hero-like character. And obviously the modern world doesn’t provide very many opportunities for people to do that. Frankly, the modern world doesn’t believe in heroism any more.” But standing on those stages, he explains, the heart’s desire of that little boy to do something important became possible.

After Kenney stepped down as premier of Alberta in 2022, Take Back Alberta gained traction, recruiting people and selling UCP memberships; the movement takes credit for getting Alberta Premier Danielle Smith elected. “I don’t think either of us look at the relationship as beholden,” David says. He claims to have only ever asked the premier for three things: no more lockdowns, no more vaccine mandates and no more electronic voting in the province. And if the premier didn’t deliver on these expectations, what then? “We’d do what we did to Kenney,” is the blunt answer.

Oh, OK …

To be clear, David is a friend of Premier Smith. Over the past few years, they bonded and “I kind of laid the groundwork for her redemption story,” he says, “that’s how I see it.”

Article content

“She’s not going to have a problem with her caucus because she genuinely wants to know what they care about and wants to help them get there because that’s who she is,” he predicts. Her biggest downfall, in his opinion, is she trusts people who don’t necessarily have her best interests at heart and “gives people a second, third and fourth chance, because that’s what she wants.”

Near the end of our conversation, David’s tone grows dark. Society is crumbling, he warns. And in light of that, he tells “his” people, “we have to take back everything, starting with rule of law and freedom of religion.” The command appeals to rooms full of parents frustrated by governments telling them the state knows best (you can see heads nodding in the mind’s eye). But I also find myself shivering when I hear other calls to arm, which, to me, sounds akin to Napoleon appealing to “the people” at the expense of the ruling government.

For Parker, it’s a Crusade: centralization of power has gotten so bad, the only path forward is revolution. It won’t be violent. He’s no Marxist. Parker plans on doing this democratically, recruiting volunteers to his cause. “I’m not looking for money, or even candidates, because I know there’s only one limited resource in politics and that’s people. If you have the people, you have the power.”

Article content

Is he looking to create a New Jerusalem on the prairies? “I wouldn’t say Jerusalem,” he responds, “I’d say Gondor. In the Lord of the Rings, Gondor is the last free city of men when darkness surrounds.” In the dark days ahead, David’s appeal is to make Alberta a light on the hill, a refuge, a fortress.

This man has declared himself a martyr. Perhaps a crazy notion. But there’s no question he’ll soon be back on the roads, criss-crossing Alberta in his F-150, and gathering the like-minded.

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our politics newsletter, First Reading, here.

Article content