Citizen Initiative Act – daveberta.ca – Alberta Politics and Elections

Albertans unhappy with the government are used to protests outside the Legislature in the deep and dark winter months but direct democracy tools introduced by the UCP a few years ago have given people new avenues to express their discontent.

A citizen initiative launched by former Edmonton-Castle Downs PC MLA Thomas Lukaszuk calling on Alberta to remain in Canada collected more than 456,000 signatures, blowing way past the required threshold of 293,000 signatures. The amazing organizational feat of the Forever Canadian campaign inspired citizen initiatives calling for a referendum question about ending government funding of private schools and banning coal mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

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The biggest distraction of the year is the fight over Alberta staying in Canada.

Premier Danielle Smith is walking a narrow line between Albertans who want a better deal with Ottawa and those who just want Alberta to outright leave Canada (or join the United States), though she has actively tipped the scales in favour of the separatists in her party.

The UCP has twice amended the Citizen Initiative Act this year. First to lower the number of signatures required to trigger a province-wide referendum and second to block the Chief Elections Officer from referring initiative questions to the courts to determine their constitutionality.

Alberta has long had a fringe separatist movement that has usually lived on the margins of the far-right, but today’s separatists are a deeply intrenched and active force inside Smith’s UCP. They showed their strength at the recent UCP AGM when Smith was booed after trumpeting her government’s memorandum of understanding about pipelines and the electrical grid with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government in Ottawa.