Corb Lund’s anti-mining petition rejected by Elections Alberta
Election Alberta said that majority of rejected signatures were due to incomplete voter information, invalid dates and duplicate signatures.
Author: Quinn Patrick
Country music star Corb Lund’s citizen initiative petition to ban new coal mining in Alberta won’t be part of the provincial referendum in October after it failed to garner enough signatures to meet the threshold.
The petition had specifically targeted two proposed coal projects: Northback’s Grassy Mountain and Valory Resources’ Blackstone mine in Alberta’s eastern slopes.
However, Elections Alberta Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure announced that the “No New Coal Mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains” petition was unsuccessful after the agency completed its verification process on Friday.
Election Alberta said that the primary reasons for signature rejections were due to incomplete voter information, invalid dates, duplicate signatures and incomplete or improperly completed canvasser witnessing declarations.
Premier Danielle Smith had previously said the Water Not Coal petition wouldn’t appear on the Oct. 19 ballot because Elections Alberta required all referendum questions by June 1.
“The petition can still proceed, but the earliest it could go to a provincial referendum is October 2027,” she told reporters at an unrelated press conference last week.
The Water Not Coal organizers told media outlets that they had collected more than 200,000 signatures, far surpassing the petition’s requirement of 177,732 verified signatures. The threshold was set to be equivalent to 10 per cent of the 1,777,315 ballots cast in Alberta’s 2023 provincial election.
While Elections Alberta initially counted 196,088 valid signatures during the initial validation process, it later determined in a subsequent statistical verification that only 172,088 of the verified signatures met the 95 per cent confidence level required.
The change left the petition 5,644 signatures short of the required threshold, representing an estimated 5.8 per cent of Alberta’s 2.97 million registered electors.
Signatures rejected during the verification phase were generally in response to electors not being able to be reached, or if they declined to verify their information. Additionally, in some cases, signatures had provided invalid contact information.