Is the Alberta Prosperity Project having trouble finding enough Albertans willing to sign its Citizen Initiative Act petition to gets its separation referendum on the ballot next fall?
One has to wonder.
It seemed as if it wouldn’t be that hard for Alberta’s far-right separation crowd to get the 177,732 valid signatures needed under the Referendum Rules for Dummies ™ version of the “direct democracy” law Premier Danielle Smith created just for them to ensure their secession question could be put to a vote, before changing the rules back again to make it harder for everyone else.
So when separation supporters like Take Back Alberta’s David Parker bragged that “we will definitely hit the 1 million signature goal of this campaign,” while that may have seemed unlikely, you had to reckon a significant number of right-wing Albertans could be persuaded to sign a petition without thinking too deeply about its implications.
That would be made even easier if a Brexit-style disinformation and misinformation campaign could be ginned up with some foreign funds, as now appears to be happening on weaponized social media sites online.
Still, if the petition’s organizers are now sending operatives – and there is no way to know if these people are Albertans or Canadians – to canvass snowbirds in Arizona and Mexico for signatures, surely this suggests they’re feeling a little anxious about their ability to get enough valid signatures here in Alberta.
Elections Alberta would be advised to examine with particular rigour the signatures obtained outside the country.
The APP has until May 2 to gather the required number of signatures.
Meanwhile, Premier Smith, the separatist movement’s chief enabler, sounds desperate to ensure something close to the APP’s blunt question – “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?” – finds its way onto a ballot next fall.
It doesn’t really matter if she’s a soft Preston Manning style reconfederationist, as she seems to have convinced a lot respectable journalists, or is a full-blown APP style deconfederationist, as one would conclude by observing what she actually does. She’s engaging in verbal contortions to justify getting a separatist question on the ballot no matter what Albertans want or the courts say.
Remember, Ms. Smith’s superpower, as a friend of mine says, is making really bad ideas sound sensible … as long as you don’t listen too carefully.
What about former Progressive Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian petition, signed by more than 450,000 Albertans – which asked, “Do you agree Alberta should remain in Canada?” – wondered journalist Paul Wells in an interview with Ms. Smith published on his Substack Friday.
At the request of the Chief Electoral Officer, a judge ruled in December that the APP question would contravene the constitution, Mr. Wells noted. “Does your Attorney General disagree? Does your Attorney General plan to pronounce on the constitutionality of this question before Albertans are asked to vote?”
Ms. Smith sounded as if she were squirming. First she attacked the wording of Mr. Lukaszuk’s petition. “I think you have to be very clear about what ‘no’ means before you put it on a ballot,” she responded. (In fact, I think we should all be pretty clear by now that no means no.)
Then, the premier rolled on, “What we wanted to do with Citizen Initiative is not have a bunch of gatekeepers prejudging whether something should or should not be asked. We wanted to see if something had enough expression of support, and then it’s up to us to put forward a question that would be constitutional and to implement them if passed in a constitutional way.” (Emphasis added.)
“So, no,” she continued, “that work hasn’t yet been done by the justice minister, because we’re waiting to see the result of the petition to see if it even does get the requisite number of signatures. …”
In other words, there will only be one gatekeeper, and that is Danielle Smith. Certainly no King’s Bench judge, schooled in the meaning of the constitution, is going to be allowed to weigh in again – even though it required changes to the law to ensure that no one but the justice minister could refer the wording of a question to a judge.
And I think we all understand that Ms. Smith’s wish is that the final wording of the separation referendum she is determined to see on the ballot is more like the APP’s than the Forever Canadian campaign’s.
Your blogger’s absence last week explained
Thanks to the several readers who sent me notes wondering what the heck had become of me, not having posted on this site for a week. All is well. I have been at meetings in Ottawa. Unfortunately, they were not secret negotiations with senior officials of the Canadian government as if I were someone in a backwards black cowboy hat negotiating without authorization on behalf of the entire population of Alberta.
One of those meetings was the annual “summit” of the Broadbent Institute, founded by the late NDP leader Ed Broadbent to 2011, the year the party saw 103 MPs elected to Parliament under Jack Layton. The meeting is still a worthwhile event, even though the NDP’s caucus in the House of Commons is somewhat smaller and the prospects of it forming a government anytime soon are, shall we say, diminished.
Alas, I am no spring chicken. The time when I could attend meetings in windowless rooms all day, dash off a 1,000-word blog post in the evening, then go to the bar are gone. Nevertheless, perhaps there will be some commentary soon arising from some of the interesting sessions at this year’s gathering. DJC