Water Not Coal petition rejected. Are you kidding me?
On Friday, July 3rd….you know….”Convenient Friday”, with the weekend ahead and the Calgary Stampede beginning the same day, we once again have wonderful distractions for people to be directing their attention. How could one not when we’ve been starving for warmer temps with sunshine days and Alberta’s biggest annual attraction?
On Friday, yesterday, (I’ve needed a day to recover from the shock) Elections Alberta rejected Corb Lund’s “Water Not Coal” petition saying the verification process found duplicate signatures and incomplete information, failing to meet the requirements for a citizen initiative petition.
Needless to say, we are not prepared to take this sitting down or at face value.
This is not the first time we’ve witnessed this trickery by a UCP government when it comes to decisions around coal mining and the protection of the Eastern Slopes. You will recall the cancellation of the 1976 Coal Development Policy for Alberta which was revealed by a media release on the Friday afternoon before the May long weekend in 2020. They make it a point to be clever at this.
Similarly, they recently did it again declaring that the deadline for this petition to be a referendum item on the October ballot had been missed. Suddenly after Corb had delivered 207,000 signatures on June 10th, the day that Elections Alberta designated as the deadline, that deadline had been missed because it mysteriously had been changed to June 1st. Who knew? Who was supposed to know? NOBODY.
Allow me to throw some numbers at you and I’ll use round numbers to keep it simple, erring on the short side.
Corb delivered some 207,000 signatures that had been scrutinized by his team, to Elections Alberta in Edmonton. 207,000 was somehow changed to 196,000 as reported by the CBC and I think it’s fair to suggest that the CBC did not pull that number from thin air.
The required number of signatures necessary to uphold the petition for referendum, based on the electoral list for Alberta is 177,000. Elections Alberta has “verified” 172,000 arriving at a shortfall of 5000. Hmmm. Based on the government’s number of 196,000 received that implies approximately 11,000 that were scrapped. However, based on Corb’s delivery of 207,000, that’s 35,000 signatures that were disqualified.
Seriously??? Let me say clearly right here and now that Corb’s team absolutely would not have allowed this to happen given that the team is made up of so many professionals who realize the necessity of integrity and the importance of credibility.
So the numbers beg the question:
How did 207,000 suddenly become 196,000 and how can Elections Alberta and the Alberta Government be content with what is seemingly a 35,000 signature discrepancy? I can offer one reason straight away. “Elections Alberta says the number of verified signatures dropped after applying a random statistical sampling method….” (CBC - July 3, 2026).
You mean to tell me that we’re supposed to accept the random sampling provided by computerization with something as significant as this? Am I outraged? You bet I am. Are you? I’m sorry but this implemented methodology with such a political hot potato is incredulous.
The Alberta government and Elections Alberta really need to be taken to task on this and right now while it’s fresh off their desk. I’d say write to your MLA but if you have one that suffers deaf ear syndrome, what’s the point? That said, something definitely needs to be done and our polite and abiding conventions don’t seem to be getting us there.
With that said I leave it to you and your connections, your groups, your individual brilliance to make noise and demand an explanation to what I see as a travesty of our democratic process.
And, you can see CBC’s coverage of this travesty here.
It is simply lies and corruption from this UCP government. There is no other explanation. I wonder how these people can sleep at night give them the BS that they pedal on an almost daily basis. But Smith follows Trump‘s lead always, and if lies and corruption doesn’t bother him, it doesn’t bother her.
A travesty!
I have no faith in this system.
Our information should never have been shared by Elections Alberta to begin with - I don’t care what the law may allow.
There’s no surprise that people ignored phone calls from unknown callers.
Even if we didn’t achieve the required number (and I doubt that greatly), that number of Albertans should NOT be ignored by the UCP government.
When will we get a government that actually works for what is best for ALL Albertans?