After weeks of public hearings with nearly a thousand people coming out to Calgary’s city hall to express their feelings on blanket rezoning, Calgary’s mayor and city council voted 9-6 to impose blanket rezoning upon the city anyway. More than 70% of presentations were from people opposed to the rezoning. Over 90% of the thousands of written submissions came from citizens opposing the rezoning. Council members never campaigned on rezoning. It just didn’t matter. They don’t care what the citizens think and the snide attitudes of some council members made that clear.What Mayor Gondek and her allies on city council have said to Calgarians is, “What are you going to do about it?”It’s a valid question. What can citizens do about it? Clearly the mayor and council don’t care what they think between elections and have no fear of pursuing personal agendas that don’t match the wishes of the citizens who put them there.I support having a citizens’-initiated recall and referendum legislation. Citizens should have a means to hold elected officials accountable between elections. The case against having such legislation has merit. Some feel we can remove elected officials every few years in an election and some feel we should live with our choice for the duration of the term come hell or high water. It’s a debatable issue.What isn’t debatable is that Alberta’s current legislation for recall and citizens-initiated referendum is worthless. It was purposely crafted by the Kenney government to be unworkable. Kenney needed to fulfill a campaign promise but didn’t want to actually arm citizens with the ability to remove elected officials. When his party passed the Recall Act in 2022, he ensured the bar to invoke a recall would be set impossibly high.The recent effort to recall Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek demonstrated how useless the legislation is. While polls have indicated Gondek is the least popular mayor in Calgary’s history, a recall effort initiated by Calgarian Landon Johnston barely managed to get over 10% of the required signatures to invoke a recall, despite hundreds of volunteers taking part in the process. On top of that, even if Johnston’s petition had somehow reached the ridiculously high 514,000 signatures required, a technicality found by city of Calgary bureaucrats has rendered the signatures of his petition to be 100% invalid. The language of the act is confusing and offers many hurdles on top of simply getting the signatures...Many democratic jurisdictions have effective recall legislation. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel to find an acceptable bar for petitioning.Alberta’s referendum legislation is just as useless as the recall rules. Again, the bar has been set too high for it to be reached by anybody and even if somebody somehow managed to initiate a referendum, it isn’t binding on the government. This mess now lands on Premier Danielle Smith’s lap to fix or ignore.Premier Smith appears to be on a mission to make municipal councils accountable. The problem is, that Smith wants them to be accountable to her government rather than citizens. Do we really need to make it easier for the provincial government to fire municipal officials or shoot down municipal bylaws? They can already do those things if they have to. It’s just not easy. Wouldn’t it make more sense to empower citizens to fire those officials and initiate plebiscites to deal with bad bylaws? No government wants to empower citizens to fire elected officials because they don’t want to see that power potentially turned against them. They will pay lip service to policies like recall and referenda, but they have no interest in giving citizens the real ability to initiate those processes.Danielle Smith has been different than most of the political leaders we have seen in the last couple of decades. She isn’t afraid to swim upstream or rock the boat. If any premier may show the courage to fix Alberta’s recall and referendum legislation, it would be her.Smith will need to be encouraged though. The UCP government already has a pile of irons in the fire. Citizens need to quit wasting time trying to pressure Calgary’s mayor and city council. Gondek and her gang clearly don’t care what they think. Energy needs to be directed to having the provincial government amending Alberta’s terrible recall and referenda legislation. If a thousand people can come out to Calgary’s city hall and 70,000 can sign a petition to recall a mayor, surely thousands can contact their MLAs.Another thing citizens must do to show they are serious is to fire politicians at election time. Alberta will be holding municipal elections next year and they are notoriously apathetic at voting time. Why should elected officials care what citizens think between elections if citizens don’t even bother themselves to vote at election time?We have the democratic tools at our disposal to effect change but we haven’t been using them effectively. If Calgary and Edmonton’s city councils both got wiped out in next year’s election, you can rest assured the provincial government would feel inspired to keep folks happy. It's up to us. It always was.
After weeks of public hearings with nearly a thousand people coming out to Calgary’s city hall to express their feelings on blanket rezoning, Calgary’s mayor and city council voted 9-6 to impose blanket rezoning upon the city anyway. More than 70% of presentations were from people opposed to the rezoning. Over 90% of the thousands of written submissions came from citizens opposing the rezoning. Council members never campaigned on rezoning. It just didn’t matter. They don’t care what the citizens think and the snide attitudes of some council members made that clear.What Mayor Gondek and her allies on city council have said to Calgarians is, “What are you going to do about it?”It’s a valid question. What can citizens do about it? Clearly the mayor and council don’t care what they think between elections and have no fear of pursuing personal agendas that don’t match the wishes of the citizens who put them there.I support having a citizens’-initiated recall and referendum legislation. Citizens should have a means to hold elected officials accountable between elections. The case against having such legislation has merit. Some feel we can remove elected officials every few years in an election and some feel we should live with our choice for the duration of the term come hell or high water. It’s a debatable issue.What isn’t debatable is that Alberta’s current legislation for recall and citizens-initiated referendum is worthless. It was purposely crafted by the Kenney government to be unworkable. Kenney needed to fulfill a campaign promise but didn’t want to actually arm citizens with the ability to remove elected officials. When his party passed the Recall Act in 2022, he ensured the bar to invoke a recall would be set impossibly high.The recent effort to recall Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek demonstrated how useless the legislation is. While polls have indicated Gondek is the least popular mayor in Calgary’s history, a recall effort initiated by Calgarian Landon Johnston barely managed to get over 10% of the required signatures to invoke a recall, despite hundreds of volunteers taking part in the process. On top of that, even if Johnston’s petition had somehow reached the ridiculously high 514,000 signatures required, a technicality found by city of Calgary bureaucrats has rendered the signatures of his petition to be 100% invalid. The language of the act is confusing and offers many hurdles on top of simply getting the signatures...Many democratic jurisdictions have effective recall legislation. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel to find an acceptable bar for petitioning.Alberta’s referendum legislation is just as useless as the recall rules. Again, the bar has been set too high for it to be reached by anybody and even if somebody somehow managed to initiate a referendum, it isn’t binding on the government. This mess now lands on Premier Danielle Smith’s lap to fix or ignore.Premier Smith appears to be on a mission to make municipal councils accountable. The problem is, that Smith wants them to be accountable to her government rather than citizens. Do we really need to make it easier for the provincial government to fire municipal officials or shoot down municipal bylaws? They can already do those things if they have to. It’s just not easy. Wouldn’t it make more sense to empower citizens to fire those officials and initiate plebiscites to deal with bad bylaws? No government wants to empower citizens to fire elected officials because they don’t want to see that power potentially turned against them. They will pay lip service to policies like recall and referenda, but they have no interest in giving citizens the real ability to initiate those processes.Danielle Smith has been different than most of the political leaders we have seen in the last couple of decades. She isn’t afraid to swim upstream or rock the boat. If any premier may show the courage to fix Alberta’s recall and referendum legislation, it would be her.Smith will need to be encouraged though. The UCP government already has a pile of irons in the fire. Citizens need to quit wasting time trying to pressure Calgary’s mayor and city council. Gondek and her gang clearly don’t care what they think. Energy needs to be directed to having the provincial government amending Alberta’s terrible recall and referenda legislation. If a thousand people can come out to Calgary’s city hall and 70,000 can sign a petition to recall a mayor, surely thousands can contact their MLAs.Another thing citizens must do to show they are serious is to fire politicians at election time. Alberta will be holding municipal elections next year and they are notoriously apathetic at voting time. Why should elected officials care what citizens think between elections if citizens don’t even bother themselves to vote at election time?We have the democratic tools at our disposal to effect change but we haven’t been using them effectively. If Calgary and Edmonton’s city councils both got wiped out in next year’s election, you can rest assured the provincial government would feel inspired to keep folks happy. It's up to us. It always was.
