Knowing that he’s almost certainly destined for the long jump, metaphorically speaking, it must be mildly satisfying for Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure to have to keep approving those MLA recall-petition applications.
Nine applicants have now been given the stamp of approval by McClure’s office to start collecting signatures to remove their MLAs.
Six of those targeted MLAs were added to the approved list yesterday. All nine applicants seek to recall United Conservative Party (UCP) MLAs. Five recall petitions will be directed at ministers in Premier Danielle Smith’s cabinet. Another target is the Speaker, and yet another is his deputy. Two backbenchers also made the list.
But what else can McClure do but approve the applications? The Recall Act is the law, just the way the UCP wrote it … and then rewrote it to make it even easier to use!
The first time, under Jason Kenney, was bad, performative policy, intended only to be used against the NDP, if at all. Something to keep the party’s “lunatic”* base happy. The second time, after Danielle Smith had ascended to Alberta’s top political job, was plain stupid, amounting to electoral malpractice.
The UCP was certainly warned that the Recall Act was bound to be a problem sooner or later, by Justice Department’s staff lawyers if by no one else. Not for us, the UCP Cabinet seems to have decided.
So they went ahead, touting the benefits of “direct democracy,” never imagining for a moment that direct democracy would be directed against them. After all, their opponents were woke snowflakes. Ha-ha! We’ll show them.
This, Dear Readers, is what is known as hubris.
Here’s the list of targeted MLAs, as it appears today on the Elections Alberta website:
- Demetrios Nicolaides, MLA for Calgary-Bow, minister of education, 16,006 verified signatures required
- Angela Pitt, Airdrie-East, Deputy Speaker, 14,813
- Nolan Dyck, Grande Prairie, 9,427
- Myles McDougall, Calgary-Fish Creek, minister of advanced education, 15,454
- Ric McIver, Calgary-Hays, Speaker, 12,820
- Muhammad Yaseen, Calgary-North, minister of immigration and multiculturalism, 9,503
- Rajan Sawhney, Calgary-North West, minister of Indigenous relations, 14,893
- RJ Sigurdson, Highwood, minister of agriculture, 15,788
- Dale Nally, Morinville-St. Albert, minister of service Alberta and red-tape reduction, 15,700
The number of verified signatures required to move the process forward is now based on 60 per cent of the total number of votes cast in the previous election.
There will undoubtedly be a few more applications to come. It’s unlikely many of the resulting petitions will accumulate enough signatures to succeed, but a couple of them might. My money would be on Nicolaides and Nally if I were going to predict a couple of possible losers from this process.
But you never know. This isn’t just a grassroots movement, it’s becoming a grassfire!
The UCP wants us to imagine that there’s a vast and well-financed woke conspiracy behind this effort. They also keep trying to persuade us that the legislation was never intended to knock off MLAs like them – just lazy bums who didn’t go to meetings, were facing criminal charges, or had committed some kind of malfeasance.
There is no evidence for the first claim. If you have some, feel free to put it in the comments. It’s certainly not the NDP Caucus in the Legislature, which is far too cautious for this. And it’s not unions, restricted by UCP legislation to what they can spend money on without asking their members’ permission. Who else is there? Pissed off teachers? Well, we’ll get to that.
As for the second claim, of course it was intended to be used just as it is being used – except against New Democrats only. Tout le monde political Alberta understands this – especially those who are yelling the loudest.
And the applicants? What do we know about them? Not much in many cases. Almost nothing in some.
There’s a geophysicist, a couple of school teachers, a principal and a school council member. So, yeah, applicant demographics do seem to tilt toward a group of citizens who just had their constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights suspended by the use of the Constitution’s Notwithstanding Clause.
More UCP hubris, that.
But this is neither a well-financed group of influential activists nor a collection of high-profile political leaders. It sounds, rather, more like a group of what Ralph Klein used to call “severely normal Albertans.”
The truth is that the UCP mischievously engineered this law because they thought it would be easy to use to discombobulate the NDP. Well, look who’s discombobulated now?
There’s never a bad time to quote the Bard of Avon. That said, though, this is a really good time.
For ’tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard; and ’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon. O, ’tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.
Hamlet speaking, that was. Act 3, Scene 4 of the play of the same name.
The Smith Government is going to end up having to repeal their own silly law. They will look like dopes, hoist with their own petard.
*Mr. Kenney’s word, not mine.
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