Alberta is Recalling. UCP MLA Angela Pitt facing recall campaign in Airdrie-East
Also: Look who’s running in the UCP AGM board elections
An MLA Recall law championed by United Conservative Party MLAs four years ago is coming back to haunt some of those politicians today.
A second recall campaign launched this month aims to recall UCP MLA Angela Pitt in her suburban Airdrie-East riding north of Calgary. Pitt is the second MLA to face a recall effort in recent weeks with a similar campaign being launched by constituents of Calgary-Bow UCP MLA and Minister of Education and Childcare Demetrios Nicolaides in October.
The recall effort comes two years after both MLAs were re-elected to the Legislature — Nicolaides by a slim 2.4 per cent margin and Pitt with a solid 26.6 per cent lead.
The law was introduced by Minister of Justice Kaycee Madu and passed by the UCP in 2021. It allows for a recall vote to happen in a riding if petitioners can collect the in-person signatures of at least 60 per cent of the number of eligible voters in the riding in the previous election. The recall vote would ask whether the MLA should be recalled and if more than 50 per cent of voters say yes then the MLA is removed and a by-election is called.
The recall law was a pledge made in the UCP’s thick party manifesto released by then-leader Jason Kenney in the 2019 election. After a series of false starts and delayed implementations, the recall law received Royal Assent on June 17, 2021 and was finally proclaimed into law on April 7, 2022.
The curiously long delayed implementation of the law most likely had to do with the UCP being 11 points behind the NDP in a poll released around the time the bill passed through the Legislature in June 2021.
The organizers behind the recall effort in Calgary-Bow have made Nicolaides’ troubled record and failures as Minister of Education and Childcare the centre of their campaign, something that is still on the top of mind of many Albertans after the government invoked the Notwithstanding Clause to force a new contract on 51,000 striking teachers. Nicolaides argued in his response to the recall campaign that his job as a cabinet minister shouldn’t reflect his record as an MLA but that’s now up to his constituents to decide.
I argued in 2021 that it would have been proactive for the UCP to limit the reasons that an MLA recall campaign could be held. Recall in the United Kingdom is limited to cases where politicians are convicted of criminal offences or providing false or misleading expenses claims while in office. But, perhaps expecting the law might be more likely used against their political opponents, the UCP chose to leave the recall law open-ended.
The person who initiated the recall campaign in Airdrie-East says that Pitt has become less responsive to community issues and concerns, and he doesn’t think people are being listened to. He also says that the goal isn’t to replace her with an NDP MLA.
The NDP winning a post-recall by-election in Calgary-Bow is a possibility, but it would be a stretch in Airdrie-East. While Pitt has aligned herself with Rob Anderson’s Free Alberta Strategy and experienced her own political challenges, the UCP has not earned less than 60 per cent of the vote in the riding in past two elections.
But it might not be as big a stretch for voters in the riding to elect a more moderate conservative aligned with Airdrie-Cochrane MLA Peter Guthrie, who resigned from the UCP cabinet and was kicked out of the party’s caucus after raising allegations of corruption and political interference in private surgical contracts. Guthrie is currently trying to change the name of the Alberta Party to the Progressive Conservative Party.
But before any by-elections happen, the recall campaign organizers need to collect those signatures to trigger a recall vote. Sixty-percent is a high bar but any mechanism created to overturn a free and fair election should be hard to reach.
Nicolaides and Pitt might not be the only UCP MLAs facing recall challenges.
A website calling itself Operation Total Recall claims to be tracking efforts in ridings around the province to launch recall campaigns.
The website claims that initial paperwork has been submitted to Elections Alberta to begin recall campaigns against Nolan Dyck in Grande Prairie, Ric McIver in Calgary-Hays, Jackie Lovely in Camrose, Myles McDougall in Calgary-Lougheed, Dale Nally in Morinville-St. Albert, Rajan Sawhney in Calgary-North West, R.J. Sigurdson in Highwood, Searle Turton in Spruce Grove-Stony Plain, and Muhammad Yaseen in Calgary-North.
Freshly returned from a 10-day trip to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that was conveniently scheduled over the first 7 days of the short 16 day fall sitting of the Legislature, Premier Danielle Smith said she was not currently considering repealing the recall law.
While the UCP might not formally repeal the law, like the Social Credit government did 88 years ago, they can make it difficult for the Chief Elections Officer to administer the recall process. UCP MLAs voted to deny a $13.5 million funding request from the head of Elections Alberta last week, instead voting to only give the independent elections office $1 million of what was requested.
Facing pressure from MLAs who didn’t expect their own recall law to be used against them, Smith did say that she’s concerned such petition drives aren’t using the legislation in good faith but instead are trying to overthrow her government. That appears to be the open intent of some of the organizers.
But why the law is being invoked by Albertans is kind of irrelevant because this is why the UCP created an open-ended recall mechanism — to allow voters to punish MLAs in-between elections.
Unless Smith is pressured to change her mind and repeal the recall law, Nicolaides and Pitt will remain the first two lucky MLAs to be the test subjects of the UCP’s recall experiment.
(I am planning to publish a second column tomorrow looking at the chaotic history of recall laws in Alberta)
Look who’s running in the UCP AGM board elections
The United Conservative Party’s board elections are happening at its AGM at the end of November and the rhetoric is heating up from the party’s bustling separatist wing.
Alberta Prosperity Project co-founder Jeffrey Rath took to the internet to accuse “Danielle Smith’s Death Star team” of abusing their access to party membership lists to purge the party board of separatists.
Rath, one of the province’s loudest and most influential separatists, is accusing the party’s board of narrowly voting against allowing a debate about Alberta separatism at the AGM. The recently released official list of policy resolutions does not include a separatism policy.
As a result, Rath appears to have endorsed Darrell Komick’s challenge of incumbent UCP President Rob Smith.
Komick is the President of the Calgary-Lougheed UCP association and is one of the key organizers behind the constituency’s Injection of Truth vaccine-misinformation town halls and the more recent Building A Framework for a Sovereign Alberta town hall.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Daveberta - Alberta politics and elections to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.