Being kicked out of the Legislature means never having to say you’re sorry

I can’t find any legislation in Alberta for electoral recall—that is, recall of an MLA decided by electoral means. Anybody may petition authorities that an MLA was elected improperly: if warranted, the determination is made by trial, not by electoral means.

Here in BC we have a Citizens’ Initiative Act which features propositions (procedure for putting a proposition on a ballot of some kind, a special plebiscite or referendum, or included on a general election ballot), petitions (by weight of signatories), and “Recall” (if at least 40% of the number of voters who voted in the previous riding election vote for Recall, the subject MLA must resign his or her seat and a by-election is called to fill the vacancy).

About thirty Recalls have been exercised in BC but not a single MLA has been Recalled by constituents’ votes—either the threshold wasn’t met, the Initiative was abandoned, or—as in one case—the subject MLA resigned before the Recall came to a vote, rendering it moot. (That BC Liberal MLA might have been forced by his party to resign rather than have Recall legitimized and perhaps encourage voters to resort to it more often if he’d become the first example of a successful Recall campaign.)

One infamous BC Petition was actually successful: an identical Petition—the “Anti-HST Petition” (Harmonized Sales Tax) was permitted limited time concurrently in each and every provincial riding, as per CI statute, and at least 10% of the number of voters who voted in each riding in the previous election signed the Petition, meeting the statuary threshold in each and every riding—legally forcing the BC Liberal government which had passed the HST legislation to act. It had a choice of repealing the statute in the Assembly (after which it could have, if it wanted or dared, re-introduce even the exact same bill, passing it with its parliamentary majority) or deciding the matter by province-wide referendum: it chose the latter—although, probably trying to look conciliatory after provoking the controversy in the first place, then-premier Gordon Campbell unilaterally reduced the super-majority threshold required in the CI statute to a simple, >50% majority threshold. Nobody complained.

As it happened, Campbell was forced to step down by caucus revolt over the controversy before the Referendum was held; the HST was eventually rejected by a majority of BC voters at-large despite numerous voting irregularities throughout the process designed to frustrate the anti-HST faction. (Campbell fired the long-serving Chief Electoral Officer, replacing him with an “Acting” Chief unilaterally instead of by the usual all-party consensus, who had to be forced by the courts to reveal the Petition results and who didn’t have to explain why the margin of difference between the victorious “No” side and the “yes” side was suspiciously more like the near even, partisan dichotomy of BC instead of the much wider margin the two sides had been consistently polling up to the Referendum—because it was conducted by mail-in ballot where fraud and veracity problems cannot be detected.

The supreme irony was that the Anti-HST Sponsor was none other than former BC premier Bill Vander Zalm who’d himself been forced to resign in disgrace by his own Socred caucus nearly two decades earlier—the CI proposal having been legislated onto the general election ballot as a referendum by the Socred government hoping to thereby regain electoral support it’d lost, partly because of Vander Zalm’s political scandals. Voters enthusiastically approved the CI proposal (which bound the new government to draft and pass CI legislation forthwith) and, just as enthusiastically, rejected the long-governing Socreds who were nearly wiped out, Mike Harcourt’s NDP winning a majority and Gordon Wilson’s newly resurrected Liberal Party of BC forming the Loyal Opposition (the Socred party soon evaporated and is now just a memory). After two decades out of the limelight, former Socred premier, “The Zalm”, had finally been vindicated: British Columbians hated the HST across party lines, and hailed the man they’d once vilified.

The frustrating dearth of Recalls in BC —zero-for-thirty—has long provoked criticism and demands for reform or fine-tuning of the CI statute, despite that single, successful, high profile and very consequential Anti-HST Initiative: the very first time in 800 years of Commonwealth parliamentary history that a legislated tax had been repealed by force of popular measure—a precedent which ensures that somewhere, sometime, Gordon Campbell’s name will be cursed for having set the precedent by some future, beset politicians trying to impose an unpopular tax.

The CI statute doesn’t have as accessible a proposition option as, say, California where they’re relatively easy to get on the general ballot and are binding on elected governments—even precluding discretionary implementation or increase of taxes to pay for essential services and infrastructure, effectively handcuffing budgeteers. The drafters of the BC CI law were quite aware of the California example—and therefore reticent to draft a similarly potent feature. In the rarest of bipartisanship in notoriously polarized BC, the all-party committee agreed the mandatory legislation shouldn’t make it too easy for voters to overturn regular elections— with wholehearted unanimity, naturally.

It appears “citizens’ initiative” in Alberta can only “recall” an MLA if charges of electoral wrongdoing can be proved in court, not because a certain proportion of voters want the MLA recalled for whatever reason like here in BC. It’s unlikely the UCP government—or any government anywhere, for that matter—would voluntarily agree to draft and pass a CI statute, one with at least some level of effectiveness: despite claims to the contrary, elected politicians don’t really want to be held to such close account. Remember the CI proposal in BC only got onto the general election ballot for totally self-interested reasons: the Socreds were desperately trying to stay in power and to improve their flagging popularity by offering the CI ‘cookie.’ Nobody had been asking for it, but since it got onto the ballot by surprise they embraced it enthusiastically regardless.

Now, if the UCP really wanted to have a meaningful referendum, instead of useless, money-wasting referenda on totally symbolic issues like separation and federal equalization funding, it could ask Albertans if they want a real Citizens’ Initiative law. There are plenty of CI models to examine and perhaps incorporate into an Alberta-made law.

Too optimistic? Too bad y’all ain’t got Recall!