Hard to Recall: Fast approaching deadlines for recall petitions targeting UCP and NDP MLAs
Will any MLAs lose their jobs because of these direct democracy campaigns? (Probably not)
It was always going to be really hard.
Two of the 26 recall campaigns launched against United Conservative Party and New Democratic Party MLAs have been submitted to Elections Alberta and have fallen short of the number of signatures needed to force a recall vote in those ridings.
The law introduced by the UCP government in 2021 allows a recall election to happen in a riding where petitioners are able to gather the in-person signatures amounting to at least sixty-percent of the number of people who voted the riding in the last provincial election. They only have three months to do it.
That’s a lot of signatures and not a lot of time.
Overturning a free and fair democratic election isn’t something that should be easy to do and, regardless of how you feel about the current government or how MLAs have behaved or misbehaved, they won their election three years ago fair and square.
The first recall campaign, which targeted UCP MLA Demetrios Nicolaides in Calgary-Bow, collected 6,519 signatures but still finished far from the 16,006 signatures required to trigger a recall vote.
The 6,519 signatures weren’t enough to cost Nicolaides his job but collecting that number of in-person signatures in a single riding is impressive. That’s still a lot of signatures.
As Minister of Education and Childcare, Nicolaides was at the centre of last year’s labour dispute with striking teachers, the decision to force an end to the strike by using the constitutional sledgehammer known as the Notwithstanding Clause, and the fumbling of a controversial book ban immediately before that.
Nicolaides’ press secretary, Garrett Koehler, said the unsuccessful recall campaign was without merit.
“The fact that only 6,500 signatures were collected — not even half the number required to trigger a recall — is clear proof that this campaign was meritless, as has been the minister’s position all along,” Koehler said in an email to the Canadian Press.
Nicolaides described the recall campaign as a vote of confidence in the government and his work as an MLA.
Former NDP MLA Shannon Phillips, who represented Lethbridge-West from 2015 to 2025 and now co-hosts The Strategists Podcast, believes the recall campaign is far from a failure.
“From an organizing perspective, identifying half of the voters you need to win a seat is a huge success,” Phillips wrote on Substack Notes. “Recalls are silly American-style gimmicks. But that’s the tool Albertans have to register their discontent right now.”
“If I was Nicolaides, I’d be out knocking on doors every weekend,” wrote Phillips. “If I had an opponent with that many voters mad enough to recall me, I’d be pretty spooked. It’s dangerous hubris to take it any other way.”
Calgary-Bow was one of the closest race in the 2023 election, with Nicolaides winning re-election over NDP candidate and former city councillor Druh Farrell by a narrow 1.5 per cent.
The second recall petition submitted to Elections Alberta finished much farther away from the required number of signatures. The recall campaign targeting UCP MLA Angela Pitt in Airdrie-East collected around 2,200 signatures, far less than the 14,813 required.
“I will not be deterred by a small fringe minority of left-wing activists with dangerous ideological views,” Pitt said in a statement in response to the submitted recall petition.
Pitt’s combative response this week is similar in tone to the statement she made when the recall campaign was launched in November 2025 when she accused the petition’s proponent, local school principal Derek Keenan, of using his position at the school to pursue a political agenda.
Keenan said at the time that Pitt had become less responsive to community issues and concerns, and he didn’t think constituents were being listened to.
“I feel positive,” Keenan told Canadian Press this week. “It really wasn’t about winning the recall — if you want to call it a win — or pushing the vote; it was really about raising awareness in our riding and calling attention to some of the concerns.”
First elected as a Wildrose Party MLA in 2015, Pitt was re-elected to a third-term with 62 per cent of the vote in the 2023 election, so the risk of her losing re-election if she decides to run again in the next provincial election is slim to none.
Pitt wasn’t the only UCP MLA to react poorly to a recall challenge.
A flustered Dale Nally, the Minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction, panicked and publicly attacked the constituent who launched the recall petition in the Morinville-St. Albert riding by accusing him of being a left-wing activist and not voting in the last provincial election.
Premier Danielle Smith, who is being targeted for recall in Brooks-Medicine Hat, blamed the proliferation of recall campaigns on the Alberta Federation of Labour, a claim AFL President Gil McGowan said was baseless.
Responses from some other MLAs were more measured and level-headed.
Minister of Technology and Innovation Nate Glubish responded to the recall effort in his Strathcona-Sherwood Park riding by writing a lengthy defence of the UCP government’s use of Artificial Intelligence software to draft the Whisky Act.
NDP MLA Amanda Chapman used the recall campaign targeting her in Calgary-Beddington as an opportunity to reflect on the reasons she ran for elected office in the first place.
Most other MLAs issued reasonable sounding responses or generic form letters and some just mostly publicly ignored the efforts, which might be the best choice in some cases.
When UCP MLAs passed the Recall Act in 2021, they almost certainly didn’t expect that some of their own caucus would become the first targets of this direct democracy tool.
Some MLAs protested loudly in the media and online that the campaigns launched against them violated the spirit of their recall law, but when they wrote the law the UCP made the decision not include any limits to why a recall campaign could be initiated.
The most curious of all the recall campaigns, or in this case a non-campaign, is happening in the Lethbridge-East riding. There is wide speculation and claims that a supporter of UCP MLA Nathan Neudorf filed the recall petition against him in order to block an actual recall campaign.
That would certainly go against the spirit of the UCP’s own law.
If the UCP had included specific rules about when recall could be used, as exists in the recall law in the United Kingdom, it’s likely that none of these recall campaigns would have been launched in Alberta in the first place.
But that’s not what happened.
The Recall Act was rushed through the Legislature during the COVID-19 pandemic with the promise that Albertans were being given the power to fire their MLAs.
Recall has ended up becoming a major annoyance for some MLAs and a harder task than some of the petition organizers might have expected, but it’s hard to fault frustrated Albertans for getting engaged and using this new democratic tool their MLAs have made available to them.
Not Alberta’s first recall experiment
This is the first time the current Recall Act law was used by Albertans but this isn’t Alberta’s first experience with MLA recall. Alberta briefly had a recall law on the books from 1936 to 1937 and that law was repealed just days after Premier William Aberhart became the target of a recall campaign in his Okotoks-High River riding.
True to character and with a revenge motive almost certainly in mind, Aberhart demanded the recall organizers send the list of people who signed the recall petition to the Premier’s Office in Edmonton. The list of names were never forwarded.
Premier Smith told reporters late last year that Justice minister Mickey Amery was going to introduce amendments to the Recall Act in response to the wave of petitions, which some political watchers speculated could be a total repeal of the law, but no amendments were introduced before the Legislature rose for the December break.
MLA Recall Campaigns in Alberta
Here’s a look at the 26 MLA recall campaigns, the number of signatures required in each riding, and the deadlines for the campaigns to submit the petitions to Elections Alberta.
Riding: Calgary-Bow
MLA: Demetrios Nicolaides
Number of signatures required: 16,006
Signature collection period ended: January 21, 2026
Number of signatures collected: 6,519
Status: Unsuccessful
Riding: Airdrie-East
MLA: Angela Pitt (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 14,813
Signature collection period ended: February 3, 2026
Number of signatures collected: Around 2,200 (official number yet to be released)
Status: Unsuccessful
Riding: Grande Prairie
MLA: Nolan Dyck (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 9,427
Signature collection period ends: February 19, 2026
Riding: Calgary-Fish Creek
MLA: Myles McDougall (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 15,454
Signature collection period ends: February 22, 2026
Riding: Calgary-Hays
MLA: Ric McIver (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 12,820
Signature collection period ends: February 22, 2026
Riding: Calgary-North
MLA: Muhammad Yaseen (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 9,503
Signature collection period ends: February 22, 2026
Riding: Calgary-North West
MLA: Rajan Sawhney (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 14,893
Signature collection period ends: February 22, 2026
Riding: Highwood
MLA: RJ Sigurdson (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 15,788
Signature collection period ends: February 22, 2026
Riding: Morinville-St. Albert
MLA: Dale Nally (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 15,700
Signature collection period ends: February 22, 2026
Riding: Athabasca-Barrhead-Westlock
MLA: Glenn Van Dijken (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 12,719
Signature collection period ends: February 23, 2026
Riding: Camrose
MLA: Jackie Lovely (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 12,391
Signature collection period ends: February 23, 2026
Riding: Lethbridge-East
MLA: Nathan Neudorf (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 13,207
Signature collection period ends: February 23, 2026
Riding: Red Deer-South
MLA: Jason Stephan (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 14,508
Signature collection period ends: February 23, 2026
Riding: Spruce Grove-Stony Plain
MLA: Searle Turton (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 15,189
Signature collection period ends: February 23, 2026
Riding: Calgary-Beddington
MLA: Amanda Chapman (NDP)
Number of signatures required: 12,492
Signature collection period ends: March 5, 2026
Riding: Calgary-East
MLA: Peter Singh (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 8,593
Signature collection period ends: March 5, 2026
Riding: Calgary-Peigan
MLA: Tanya Fir (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 13,051
Signature collection period ends: March 5, 2026
Riding: Red Deer-North
MLA: Adriana LaGrange (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 11,174
Signature collection period ends: March 5, 2026
Riding: Brooks-Medicine Hat
MLA: Danielle Smith (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 12,070
Signature collection period ends: March 10, 2026
Riding: Calgary-Shaw
MLA: Rebecca Schulz (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 15,000
Signature collection period ends: March 10, 2026
Riding: Sherwood Park-Strathcona
MLA: Nate Glubish (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 15,770
Signature collection period ends: March 10, 2026
Riding: Calgary-Cross
MLA: Mickey Amery (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 9,083
Signature collection period ends: March 17, 2026
Riding: Fort Saskatchewan-Vegreville
MLA: Jackie Armstrong-Homeniuk (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 14,688
Signature collection period ends: March 17, 2026
Riding: Cypress-Medicine Hat
MLA: Justin Wright (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 13,150
Signature collection period ends: March 23, 2026
Riding: Edmonton-Beverly-Clareview
MLA: Peggy Wright (NDP)
Number of signatures required: 8,917
Signature collection period ends: March 23, 2026
Riding: Grande Prairie-Wapiti
MLA: Ron Wiebe (UCP)
Number of signatures required: 11,921
Signature collection period ends: March 23, 2026