“Too big to rig,” proclaimed yesterday’s Canadian Press headline, carrying more than a little water for Jeffrey Rath, house legalist of the separatist Alberta Prosperity Project, who spoke the words. “Alberta separation petition succeeds with 223K verified signatures,” the rest of the headline said, factually enough up to a point.
So there’s your hard-news summary of yesterday’s development in the continuing saga of the Alberta Prosperity Project/Stay Free Alberta-proposed, United Conservative Party-backed separation petition that a Court of King’s Bench judge ruled to be unconstitutional in May and on which the Alberta Court of Appeal has yet to render a decision.
Still, someone reading this headline far from Wild Rose Country might conclude that Alberta has already all but separated from Canada. That’s not quite the case, though. The CBC’s headline on its version of the story was less colourful, but had the quality of being both easy to understand and accurate: “Elections Alberta verifies signatures for petition calling for independence referendum.”
Elections Alberta – which describes itself as “an independent, non-partisan office of the Legislative Assembly, responsible for administering provincial elections, by-elections and referendums” – declared in a press release yesterday that based on the 384 signatures it verified it was confident that of the 279,337 signatures it counted that 222,597 were valid.
This led news reports to state that Elections Alberta “found 222,597 verified signatures.” I’m pretty sure you can’t reach that conclusion based on what Elections Alberta actually said in its long and murky commentary.
The agency called the 222,597 signatures that received its imprimatur the “Total number of verified signatures after random statistical sampling method applied with a 95% confidence level (Citizen Initiative Act s.6(5)).”
Elections Alberta said that as part of the verification process, it “screened the petition and has confirmed that none of the signatures submitted came from the seeded names on the Republican Party of Alberta’s List of Electors.”
This, of course, does not mean that the illegally obtained and used list was not utilized by domestic or foreign actors to contact and proselytize would-be signers, or for other more nefarious purposes.
“Caller ID identifying calls were from Elections AB was active for the petition verification process,” the press release also said. Presumably that was noted because they were definitely not identified to signers of musician Corb Lund’s Water Not Coal petition – at least the call I received and answered was not.
So what’s next? As Elections Alberta pointed out, the next step in the process remains on hold while the proponents, and the Alberta Government, appeal the Court of King’s Bench ruling on the constitutionality of the question.
In two decisions in May, Justice Shaina Leonard ruled that Chief Elections Officer Gordon McClure made an error in law when he approved the APP/SFA citizen initiative petition and didn’t consider an earlier court decision saying Alberta separation would violate the treaty rights of First Nations.
Then in June, APP/SFA got a break when another judge decided the signature verification process could proceed while the appeal of the original decision continued, but everything else would have to await the Appeal Court’s decision.
I suspect most Albertans would have been prepared to accept the agency’s assertion its conclusion was based on a “statistically valid sample size” were it not for the fiasco surrounding its rejection of Mr. Lund’s Water Not Coal petition at the start of this month.
“I think we got screwed on this thing pretty hard, actually,” Mr. Lund said a few days after that decision by Elections Alberta. “After being briefed by my lawyer/scrutineer that was in the room during the count, I have some real issues with the way this was handled.”
“The system proved to be so deeply flawed that many people believe it’s crooked,” Postmedia columnist Don Braid said in a July 10 column.
So rest assured that public confidence in the dramatically different results of Elections Alberta’s decision on the separation petition will be somewhat south of the agency’s 95-per-cent confidence level as well.
An interesting question someone might want to ask Elections Alberta or the appropriate UCP politicians is, Did Justice Minister Mickey Amery’s department have a lawyer-scrutineer in on the counting of the APP/SFA signature validation process? If yes, did they challenge as large a percentage of signatures as in the case of Water Not Coal? And if not, why not?
For his part, Mr. Rath told The Canadian Press that Elections Alberta was biased against his side, claiming that “we succeeded in spite of them.”
“We knew we needed to have way more signatures than we needed,” he told CP, “because we knew Elections Alberta was going to pull every dirty trick in the book to try to disqualify us.”
So, at this point, Elections Alberta has so botched the process that both pro-Canadian and pro-separation Albertans profoundly distrust it.
No reasonable government would allow a separation referendum to proceed on Oct. 19 in the hands of an agency with a credibility gap as wide as the province. The United Conservative Party is determined to do so anyway, for reasons that now should be obvious to anyone paying attention.
“Albertans are barrelling towards the separation referendum that Danielle Smith forced upon us and she and her government don’t appear to be interested in talking about it,” political commentator Dave Cournoyer observed wonderingly in his Substack yesterday.
No matter what happens on Referendum Day, this will not end well.
