The creator of a petition to trigger a referendum on Alberta separation says he’s reached the required number of signatures a month ahead of schedule, a milestone that, while still unverified, will crank up the heat on an issue that has roiled the prairie province.
The group Stay Free Alberta hit the required 177,732 signatures sometime on Monday, organizer Mitch Sylvestre revealed to canvassers gathered on a Zoom call that evening. “I was pretty happy, but somewhat relieved, because it’s in my name, I’m in charge of it,” he told the Star later. “Now that that’s accomplished, we can just pile more signatures onto what we have.”
The question Sylvestre would see put to Albertans is unabashedly separatist — “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state? ” — and Sylvestre himself, the owner of a family-run sporting good store, has emerged as one of the most vocal backers of the argument that independence is the only way to increase oil production, decrease immigration and, as he sees it, throw off the shackles of Ottawa.
While polling has consistently shown only a minority of Albertans support separatism, the newly-vocal movement and the frustration it represents has driven a wedge into provincial politics.
Premier Danielle Smith has repeatedly said she supports Canada but has struggled to appease the separatist sentiment within her own party. She lowered the bar for a successful petition in time for the separatists to take advantage and earlier this week said that a “diversity of opinions” were welcome in her caucus after a government MLA publicly broke ranks and expressed support for a referendum in an online op-ed.
This news comes as Alberta and Ottawa are set to miss the first deadline in their energy and climate deal inked last fall; an agreement viewed as Smith’s attempt to renegotiate the relationship with Prime Minister Mark Carney.
Despite having crossed the winning threshold, equal to 10 per cent of the votes cast in the last election, Sylvestre says they don’t plan to submit any signatures until the May 2 deadline. At that point Elections Alberta will have a maximum of 21 days to double check that each represents an eligible voter. The confirmation of addresses is expected to be a particularly thorny challenge for the separatists, who draw much of their support from rural areas. People outside cities are more likely to list PO boxes as addresses on their identification — as opposed to physical addresses — which alone are not enough to prove they reside in the province.
But Sylvestre says that each would-be signer faced a strict verification process from canvassers who have been travelling the province since early January. “We checked the actual land description of the actual physical location of where people live,” he said. When it comes to ballots being ruled ineligible, “I think we’re going to have less than two per cent.”
If the separatist petition is verified, it could go to Albertans this fall. Smith’s government has already scheduled a referendum in October on nine questions that give voice to the Ottawa-centric discontent some Albertans feel, tackling issues such as immigration control and representation in the Senate. If a citizen-led petition gets enough signatures by then, she has said it will be added to the list. (There is another petition currently gathering signatures in support of a ban on coal mining in the Rockies, spearheaded by country music artist Corb Lund.)
There was also a pro-Canada petition — Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada? — that gathered just over 404,000 verified signatures last fall, or more than double what the separatist side currently says they have. That petition got rolling before Alberta lowered the bar and so had to gather more signatures in less time, but will not go to a referendum because of slightly murky rules under which its author sought a policy resolution, which has not come to pass.
While Sylvestre says he accepts Smith’s pro-Canada stance, her government has backed the process that could allow him to put his cause to Albertans. “I don’t think (the governing United Conservative Party) could have done any more to allow us to do this.”
This week the Alberta government made a move to change the law governing petitions again, which, if passed, would outlaw petitions for the year before and after elections, and remove deadlines for the government to call a referendum should any succeed in future.
