Inside Alberta recall campaigners’ cold, hard road to collect signatures to oust MLAs | CBC News

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.

“We’re hoping that by being visible and demonstrating that there is pushback, even if we don’t get the recall, there will be a shift in people’s voting choices in the next election.”  

Sorensen’s table may have stood in a high vehicle traffic area in Creekside Shopping Centre in Calgary’s northern suburbs. But there weren’t any sidewalks where Sorensen was petitioning, as political activity wasn’t allowed close to the stores within the sprawling retail plaza.

Rather, Sorensen stood at the grassy edge of the plaza parking lot’s entrance, near a drive-thru Taco Bell.

It’s been a struggle to find businesses willing to let the anti-Yaseen petitioners canvass inside, said Siobhan Cooksley, that riding’s lead campaigner.

“They are not political and don’t want to be involved in it.”

So out in the cold they go. Jamie Levescont, another Yaseen campaigner, said he waited outside a church one nippy Sunday to get all of two signatures.

As of Dec. 22, that campaign tallied about 350 signatures, Cooksley said — less than four per cent of the target with two months to go until the deadline.

In the one hour CBC News stood outside with her team, only one couple stopped by on their way home with takeout coffee.

“We turned three times just to get here, to put our names on and make sure that we send a message,” said Johnny Nguyen.

He views it as a vote against Alberta separatism.

“It’s our future, our home, right?” he said. “We want to be part of Canada forever.”

Yaseen, the province’s associate minister of multiculturalism, has not publicly espoused separatist views.

“This recall arises from policy disagreements, not my performance as an MLA,” Yaseen wrote in a public response to the recall efforts.

The effort to recall backbencher Peter Singh has found more success in terms of getting indoors. One café in Forest Lawn gives campaigners a couple hours on a Tuesday when it’s not open.

And they set up one Saturday morning at a Wave Coffee House, in tandem with the neighbouring campaign to recall Justice Minister Mickey Amery. It may be three kilometres outside Singh’s riding, but it was warm and welcoming.

That campaign got seven signatures in an hour, which recall organizer Denise Hammond was enthused with. It’s about what a door-to-door canvasser takes two hours to collect.

She said it’s been difficult to find volunteers to help her get the word out, and to fund the campaign.

About halfway through the petition drive, Hammond’s group only has a couple hundred signatures. They need 8,593.

One signatory asks how it’s going.

“We’re not doing too hot yet,” Hammond said. “Tell everyone you know about this.”

Some people she meets in Calgary-East don’t even know who their MLA is, unlike members with higher profiles, like Nicolaides, the political face of the teachers’ strike that Premier Danielle Smith’s government controversially ended last fall with the notwithstanding clause.

Smith is the highest profile politician facing recall, in her riding of Brooks-Medicine Hat.

Organizers there say they have 50 volunteers gathering signatures. But Heather VanSnick, the lead petitioner, didn’t want to divulge how many signatures they have out of concern the province could change the rules.

Smith has said the recall campaigns have become a “weaponized” retaliation by organizers who want the UCP out, rather than using the mechanism to oust problematic politicians. Her caucus had considered altering recall rules last fall, but ultimately chose to wait until the current petition drive plays out.

The bid to recall the premier has held events inside a supportive bakery, on the sidewalk at a community holiday centre, and in front of downtown Medicine Hat’s arts centre.

They’ve had the most success at the bakery, where canvassers try to grab customers’ attention from a table set up in the corner. 

There, about two dozen people signed Smith’s recall over the course of two hours.

While she wouldn’t share numbers, VanSnick said “anything’s in the realm of possibility.”

“When you have a community that is determined to be together, to stick together, to stand up for human rights, to stand up for their community, in what they believe in, I think anything is possible.”