EDMONTON – In September 2021, as Albertans grappled with the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of their elected representatives quietly launched what court documents later described as a massive brute-force assault on the province’s new vaccine records portal.
NDP MLA Thomas Dang, then representing Edmonton-South, ran approximately 1.78 million automated queries on the site. Using publicly available information about Premier Jason Kenney’s birthdate and vaccination details, his script eventually pulled up what he was hacking for – sensitive personal health information.
It was no accident. Court records and Dang’s own later admissions confirmed he deliberately bypassed security measures to test for vulnerabilities after a constituent tip. The scale was staggering: nearly two million attempts in just a few days to rifle through Albertans’ private medical data.
The breach violated the Health Information Act and represented a profound betrayal of public trust. Private medical records – among the most protected categories of personal information in a free society – were treated as a playground for political point-scoring. Albertans were furious. Many saw it not as “white-hat hacking,” but as an elected official abusing his position to access data that ordinary citizens expect to remain locked away from prying eyes.
Yet consequences were minimal. Dang resigned from the NDP caucus only after the RCMP executed a search warrant on his home in December 2021. In November 2022, he pleaded guilty to one count under the Health Information Act. The penalty? A $7,200 fine – a fraction of the $200,000 maximum. No jail time and no criminal record under the Criminal Code, as many Albertans felt he deserved. Critics called it a mere slap on the wrist for what many viewed as a serious invasion of privacy on a massive scale.
What made the episode even more galling for outraged Albertans was Rachel Notley’s decision just weeks after the breach. Despite her office having been informed of Dang’s actions – including the extraordinary volume of searches – Notley appointed him as the NDP’s democracy and ethics critic in October 2021.
The promotion sent a clear message: in an NDP-governed Alberta, accountability took a back seat.
