Alberta Premier Wants to Make Recall Legislation More ‘Achievable’

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith delivers the state of the province address in Edmonton on Oct. 25, 2023. The Canadian Press/Jason Fransson

A petition to recall Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek was submitted to Elections Calgary by the deadline of April 4, but without the number of signatures needed to remove the mayor from office.

Landon Johnston, the man behind the petition, wrote on X: “72,200 signatures in 60 days – not enough to force the mayor to resign.”

“But enough to start a conversation and a movement. The pressure is on council to shape up. This city belongs to us, and we deserve better from our elected officials,” he said in the post.

It was a very high bar from the start. Under Alberta’s recall legislation, Mr. Johnston and the many volunteers helping him would have needed over 514,000 signatures within 60 days to remove Ms. Gondek from office, or 40 percent of Calgary’s population.

By comparison, only 393,090 people voted in the 2021 municipal election that saw Ms. Gondek elected mayor.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said on April 5 that her government is looking at changing the recall legislation to make it more “achievable.”

“What we’ve learned is that the initial legislation that we had set the bar a bit high, unrealistically so, and I think it’s created frustration on the part of citizens that if you set a rule in place, it should be reasonably achievable,” Ms. Smith told a news conference.

“The issue that we had is we set it based on 40 percent of the population, which of course includes a whole pile of people who can’t vote, whether it’s because they’re newcomers or because they’re under the age of 18,” she said.

She told reporters the government did not want to make any changes while the petition was ongoing but it is something they are going to look at.

“And so we’ll begin that process to see if there’s another bar,” she said. “But we want to do a little more consultation on that.”

Calgary’s mayor has been criticized for a number of her stances, from supporting a “safe and inclusive” public bylaw that restricted public protests to opting out of a Menorah lighting at city hall that she said had been politicized. But for Mr. Johnston, it was city council’s single-use items bylaw she supported that was the last straw.

The bylaw requires restaurants and retail stores to charge for items like paper bags, and to ask customers if they want items like cutlery and napkins. Council voted to start the process to repeal the bylaw about two weeks after it was introduced in January, but it remains in place until the repeal is official. The City of Calgary website says a public hearing on repealing the bylaw will be held on May 7.

Mr. Johnston met with Ms. Gondek on March 22 to discuss his concerns about the city’s direction. He told reporters at the time that the mayor had been very friendly and listened to everything he had to say.

In a statement issued on March 22, Ms. Gondek said much the same thing.

“While he and I may not agree on policies, I think we share a desire to do good things for Calgary,” her statement said in part. “It’s clear that this petition has resonated with some … I’m going to make it my job to listen even more closely to Calgarians’ concerns and work even harder to address what I can.”

The City of Calgary has 45 days to count the number of names on the petition, the first step in determining if the petition is sufficient to recall the mayor.

If enough signatures had been collected, and the petition verified, Ms. Gondek would have been removed from council and a byelection held to elect a new mayor.