Under Alberta’s legislation, 177,732 signatures from eligible Alberta voters are required on a petition to trigger a referendum. Stay Free Alberta collected and submitted 279,337 signatures.
Having lost the ability to claim electoral lists were used by Stay Free Alberta in petitioning for an independence referendum, NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi is now trying to move the goalposts.
In a posting on X, Nenshi said, “Before Danielle Smith repeatedly changed the rules to help the separatists, they would have needed roughly 600,000 signatures to force a vote. The separatists didn't even come close to that number. The separatists didn't even come close to that number, and nearly 80,000 signatures were tossed by Elections Alberta….”
Under Alberta’s legislation, 177,732 signatures from eligible Alberta voters are required on a petition to trigger a referendum. Stay Free Alberta collected and submitted 279,337 signatures.
After an unusually stringent verification process imposed by Elections Alberta, that count was reduced to 222,597 signatures, which is still more than enough to surpass the legislative requirement as per the Citizen Initiative Act.
Nenshi treating normal attrition as proof of illegitimacy is the classic “if I can’t win on the numbers that count, invent numbers that don’t.”
The 600,000 figure Nenshi is batting around refers to the bar for petitioning set by the Jason Kenney government in 2021. Kenney had purposely set the bar to initiate a referendum so high it would never be surpassed, and it worked. Nobody managed to initiate a referendum until the legislation was amended to bring the threshold to a reasonable level in 2025.
The current threshold still prevents initiatives from passing if there isn’t enough public support, as demonstrated by the failure of Corb Lund to gather enough signatures to hold a referendum to ban coal mining in Alberta’s Eastern Slopes.
Measuring the success of the petition against older legislative requirements is no more valid than measuring it against the requirements set in other countries. Prior to 2021, there was no legislation at all for citizen-initiated referenda.
The contemporary set of rules is all that matters right now, and by every measure, Stay Free Alberta met all the requirements to invoke a referendum.
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