Alberta recall campaigners' cold, hard road to collect signatures to oust MLAs

A car honked as it passed by the table Julietta Sorensen had set out in the cold January wind.

“Not sure if that’s a pro, against or completely unrelated,” said Sorensen, who was braving the weather to solicit signatures for her recall petition against Calgary-North UCP MLA Muhammad Yaseen.

In nearly two hours standing outside, canvassers got seven signatures of the 9,503 required to trigger a recall election for Yaseen.

This was the marquee event that day for the Recall Yaseen campaign — a group whose target, like most other recall bids around Alberta, requires more than 100 signatures on average every day for the whole 90-day petitioning period.

The bid to recall Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides concluded this week, the first deadline among 26 such campaigns launched last fall in the province — nearly all against UCP MLAs.

On Tuesday, organizer Jenny Yeremiy said she drove a box stacked with petitions containing 6,500 signatures to Elections Alberta headquarters in Edmonton. That’s well below the 16,006-person threshold in that riding (based on the legislated formula of 60 per cent of total votes cast last election). 

Other campaigns appear set to fall well short of the bar set by the Nicolaides’s campaign, and might be lucky to get in signatures numbering in the thousands. Some recall efforts say they’ve only gotten a few hundred names on paper after a month or more.

While not giving up, campaigns have started to shift their aspirations to send a protest message to MLAs.

In Nicolaides’ Calgary-Bow, it was still a “boatload” of people fed up with their MLA who showed their “willingness to do something about it,” said Yeremiy.

“It’s not about a signature count,” she added. Yeremiy doesn’t want her group to be perceived as losers based on the recall threshold’s “impossible standards.”

Consider that 13,300 Calgary-Bow residents voted for a party other than UCP in the 2023 election. Yeremiy’s canvassers would have needed to find all of those people and nearly 3,000 more.

Yaseen only won his Calgary-North riding by 129 votes — one of the closest margins in Alberta. And with lower election turnout there, the Recall Yaseen campaign needs fewer signatures than most others.

But it’s still proven daunting.

“It’s less about actually removing people from office,” Sorensen told CBC News.