Lethbridge MLA's recall campaign doing no visible campaigning, spurning volunteers

Lucretia Apperloo leaped at the chance to join the push to recall her Lethbridge-East MLA, Nathan Neudorf.

The administrative assistant emailed the lead petitioner two weeks ago, filled out registration forms, and submitted them to the person she was told was the petition’s volunteer co-ordinator at a coffee shop last Monday.

Since then — nothing.

She has not received her signature-collecting forms, heard back from the Recall Neudorf team, or gotten email replies when she checked in. Nobody she knows has.

Nor are there any publicly advertised petition-signing locations, or a website or social media accounts telling locals where they can go. That's different from more than a dozen other local recall campaigns around Alberta.

Apperloo and other locals say they are frustrated and concerned that Ryan Tanner, the Lethbridge man who launched this recall bid, might be simply sitting around and letting the days tick by in what’s supposed to be a 90-day campaign to get 13,207 Lethbridge-East residents to sign recall forms.

They’re worried it’s a sham, actually designed to prevent the United Conservative MLA and cabinet minister from being recalled.

“We’re already two weeks into this and we haven’t even had one signature collected,” Apperloo said. “So it’s very frustrating.”

Seventeen UCP members and one NDP MLA are currently facing recall campaigns, and more petition drives are in the works, including one against Premier Danielle Smith.

Most of the efforts are led by local activists under the Operation Total Recall umbrella, launched in the wake of the Smith government using the notwithstanding clause to force an end to a teachers' strike.

Jeff Milner, a teacher in Lethbridge-East and supporter of the Total Recall movement, had applied to run a recall campaign against Neudorf. When Elections Alberta approved Tanner’s application first, Milner reached out to offer his team’s support, but said all he got was a standard reply with zero followup.

Tanner hasn’t done local media interviews or responded to queries, including one Monday by CBC News. Many locals complain he’s also been non-responsive to their offers to help.

It took Apperloo a few days to get a response from him, as it did for Barb Phillips, a fellow would-be canvasser. They eventually got replies from Tanner, who wrote to apologize for how “overwhelmed” he’d been with volunteers.

The women said after collecting some basic information from them, Tanner invited them to a Tim Hortons in the riding on Dec. 1, to meet a volunteer co-ordinator named Mike and register as canvassers.