A billboard reading “Send Ottawa a message. Choose Alberta” went up near Taber, Alberta — one of the most conservative communities in the province.

Then, bureaucrats received complaints and sent a letter to the billboard company demanding it be taken down. What happened next was the Streisand Effect in action.

Cory Morgan, founder of the third-party campaign group Pathway to Independence, which was behind the ad, joined Ezra Levant on The Ezra Levant Show last week to talk about the backlash and the windfall that followed.

“I don't think it's setting a good precedent if towns can start determining who may or may not advertise on private space during a campaign,” Morgan said.

So far, the billboard company has held firm and refused to remove it.

Ezra noted that political speech enjoys some of the strongest protections in Canadian law precisely because it serves not just the speaker and listener, but the democratic process itself. It was “sort of crazy” for Taber's bureaucrats to target a sign this benign, he said.

The attempted suppression of the sign, predictably, had the opposite of its intended effect.

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Morgan said donations poured in from across the province, with supporters expressly directing their money toward more billboards. A second sign is now live on Highway 1 on the east side of Calgary, and Morgan is negotiating several additional locations.

“Our strategy is: if you keep trying to get them banned, I'm going to keep getting donors and we're only going to spread farther,” Morgan, a columnist with the Western Standard and contributor to Rebel News' Alberta Fact Check campaign said.

“I can only thank the complainants for this.”

Elections Alberta filings showed $26,000 raised at the time of the interview — but Morgan confirmed the real number was already over $41,000, with smaller donations still being processed. A group that expected to raise a few thousand dollars and distribute a few hundred lawn signs suddenly found itself fielding hundreds of sign requests from across the province.

Follow all of Morgan and Sheila Gunn Reid's fact checking at AlbertaFactcheck.com, where the pair keep a watchful eye on falsehoods surrounding independence ahead of October's referendum.