Albertans Are Driving Their Government Crazy by Following New Laws Too Much

Something funny is happening in Alberta. People in the province are complying with the law, and it’s driving the government bonkers.

The roots of this affair go back to June of 2021, when two bills introduced under then premier Jason Kenney received royal assent. They’re key to this story.

The first was the Citizen Initiative Act, which allowed any voter in Alberta to launch a petition for a proposed policy change, a proposed legislative change, or a proposed referendum, provided they gathered enough signatures within ninety days (10 percent of voters for policy and legislative proposals and 20 percent for referendums).

The second was its sister legislation, the Recall Act. It allows citizens to organize formal petition drives to recall municipal politicians, school board trustees, and members of the legislature. Alberta had something similar in 1936 but dropped it the next year after an attempted recall of premier William Aberhart.

Fast-forward to spring 2025. Danielle Smith is leader of the United Conservative Party and premier of Alberta. An organization called the Alberta Prosperity Project is travelling the province pitching its plan for a referendum on an independent Alberta. The UCP, which counts some would-be separatists among its ranks, tinkers with the Citizen Initiative Act. The government lowers the number of required signatures on constitutional initiatives to 10 percent of eligible voters and increases the timeline for collecting signatures to 120 days. This makes it easier to meet the bar for a referendum and paves the way for a vote on separation.

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The first citizen initiative drive comes from an unexpected player. Thomas Lukaszuk, a former deputy premier in Alberta under the Progressive Conservatives, files an application. His campaign is called Forever Canadian. His question: “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”

Over the next ninety days, his canvassers pop up everywhere. It’s summer, and the days are long and nice, and the Forever Canadian volunteers set up little tables in parks and at bus stops with a petition for people to sign.

Lukaszuk files the signatures from his petition at the end of October. The number is eye-popping: 404,293 verified signatures. That’s 13.6 percent of eligible voters in the province, and more than 100,000 over the threshold. Alberta’s first referendum question appears ready to go, and it would ask Albertans if they want to stay in Canada.

While all this is happening, the CEO of the Alberta Prosperity Project puts in his own application for a citizen initiative. His question: “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be part of Canada to become an independent state?”

This petition hits a snag. The chief electoral officer punts it to the Court of King’s Bench to weigh in on whether the question contravenes the Constitution Act of 1982. The process takes a while. So hold that thought. We’ll come back to these citizen initiatives in a minute.

Something else important happens in the summer of 2025. Alberta’s minister of education, Demetrios Nicolaides, issues a ministerial order for new province-wide “standards” on school library materials. It’s a book ban, although the UCP doesn’t call it a book ban. The order requires books with “explicit sexual content” to be removed from school libraries.

Staff from Edmonton Public School Board respond enthusiastically. They put together a list of books that meet the standards of the not-a-ban book ban. More than 200 books make the list, including classics like The Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World, and Jaws.

The government protests: that’s not what the ministerial order meant. It was supposed to be offensive materials, not well-known classics with sexual material.

Premier Smith declares the board’s list a form of “vicious compliance.” She likely means “malicious compliance”—a term used to describe the act of deliberately following orders to the letter, so much so that the outcome is absurd. The UCP revises its rules, specifying the ban does not cover written passages of explicit sexual content, only visual.

Fall arrives. Alberta teachers walk off the job in a strike on October 6, frustrated over growing class sizes and increasing complexity in their classrooms. The following day, Jenny Yeremiy, a geophysicist and an advocate for cleaner energy policy who’d run and lost as an Alberta Party candidate in the 2023 election, files a recall petition against Nicolaides. She says he’s failed to support public education, prioritizes privatization and allows fossil fuel disinformation in schools. She needs the signatures of at least 60 per cent of the voters who voted in Nicolaides’ riding in last election. That’s 16,006 Calgarians.

Before the teachers’ strike ends, another recall petition is approved—this time for deputy speaker and UCP MLA Angela Pitt. And nineteen days after that, another. One more, four days later, and so on to today: twenty-one recall petitions are now underway, including one for the premier and one for an NDP MLA. That’s nearly one-quarter of sitting MLAs facing potential recall. There are so many that Elections Alberta has received an additional $6.7 million in funding to cover recall petitions and—oh, yes—the cost of a potential referendum.

“[The UCP] imagine how much fun they’re going to have using that law, and they don’t think through scenarios where somebody else might use it,” said Janet Brown, a political commentator and pollster in Alberta. “To pass a law without really thinking about how it’s going to be used in reality seems short-sighted.”

These recalls do not seem to be happening because of widespread rebellion in Alberta. Lisa Young, a professor of political science at the University of Calgary, suggested they’re what happens when legislation is rushed through without sober second thought in committee or public debate. The UCP put a time limit around important bills like back-to-work legislation for teachers and restrictions on rights for transgender people.

“[The UCP] get the critical feedback after the fact, and they’re not keen on it,” she said.

The party has used the notwithstanding clause four times since October 27, 2025, in an attempt to block potential legal challenges.

It’s unlikely any of the recall petitions will be successful. The bar is high. Smith and Prime Minister Carney just announced an MOU over Canada’s energy future, which helps get a new oil pipeline to the BC coast and makes many Albertans happy. Plus, it’s winter, and it’s too cold to set up signing tables for petitions in parks.

Young and Yeremiy suggested that the Nicolaides recall has the highest chance of success. Even so, organizers have collected only about 30 percent of the signatures they need, Yeremiy told The Walrus. They plan to step up efforts over the holidays and are organizing volunteers to go door knocking.

Their campaign has gotten under the skin of the UCP. Nicolaides wrote a letter appealing to his constituents, criticizing the recall as an attempt to “trigger a new election” and “subvert the democratic mandate you gave me just two years ago.” In a December press conference, justice minister Mickey Amery suggested that the party even considered changing the act, but decided against.

The legislation has been “irresponsibly misused and weaponized for political purposes,” he said. “This has been a clear abuse of process. We’ve been clear that the Recall Act should be used for ethical violations and breaches of public trust.”

Amery was announcing a new omnibus bill that tweaks the Citizen Initiative Act again. It gives the minister of justice decision-making power over whether a petition is too similar to a past one to proceed. That power used to sit with the CEO of Elections Alberta.

And so, that court decision that Albertans had been waiting on about the separation question? The judge decided the question goes against Charter and treaty rights. But that doesn’t matter anymore. The justice minister and his party get to make the call on what question Albertans could face in a referendum: One to stay? To leave? Or both? That is, of course, if the UCP does not change the legislation again.