The UCP empowered Albertans to have their say. Now it may be coming back to bite them

In game theory, one of the smartest strategies is to design the rules assuming you won’t always be the player in control. Power is a complex game. And in politics, governments change and coalitions shift constantly in response to public sentiment. Something that advantages you today may hurt you tomorrow. It’s a well-understood principle in responsible governance—never create a tool that you can’t trust in the hands of your opponents. The Alberta government is now grappling with that lesson through the province’s recall legislation. When the United Conservative Party (UCP) under Jason Kenney passed recall legislation and citizen-initiated petitions in 2021, the idea was to empower citizens to have a say between elections and create consequences for elected officials who lost the confidence of their communities. “This is really all about trying to empower the electorate,” Mark Smith, the then MLA for Drayton Valley-Devon, said at the time when he introduced the bill. Direct democracy has long been a hobby horse in conservative circles, particularly in the West. It echoes the Reform Party-era belief that Ottawa was too distant and uncaring about the concerns of voters in places like Alberta. There should be a way for everyday folks to channel their frustration through a sort of pressure valve. But one thing Preston Manning himself emphasized is that direct democracy is agnostic. The tools do not favour any party or movement over another. They simply make public dissatisfaction easier to organize. The current wave of recall efforts in Alberta—dubbed Operation Total Recall—which includes petitions targeting an ever-growing list of UCP MLAs, is a sight to behold and illustrates that point. Though lawful, the government’s use of the notwithstanding clause to end the teachers’ strike and impose a contract has mobilized citizens across the province to gather signatures and use the tool the province created against it. It has also sparked considerable speculation about who’s driving the backlash and whether labour organizers are responsible. The bar for recalling an MLA, which would remove the elected official from office, is high, and for good reason. Politicians are elected to govern, and they should be given the time to do so, especially in a majority mandate. Under the law, petitioners must collect valid signatures equal to 60 percent of the total votes cast in the riding. And even if that threshold is met, the MLA doesn’t automatically lose their seat. A recall vote must then be held, and a majority of voters must choose to eject that person. There are strict timelines and verification requirements on top of that. Basically, it’s a lot! It’s not clear how many of the two dozen or so campaigns underway at the time of publication will check all those boxes. Only two are formally in progress (against Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides and Airdrie MLA Angela Pitt). But the petitioners are obviously energized by the Forever Canadian campaign that did what many skeptics assumed was impossible. Former PC deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk and his organizers collected more than 450,000 signatures province-wide to file an anti-separation citizens’ initiative. His campaign is distinct from the recall efforts both in purpose and in process, though I am sure there’s significant overlap in supporters. There are parallels, too, around unintended consequences for the government. In sport, they say once a record has been broken, a psychological barrier breaks with it. What seemed out of reach in the past suddenly becomes achievable now. The same could theoretically happen with these recalls. However, Elections Alberta says it does not have the funding required to verify the deluge of petitions within the legal timelines. The UCP-dominated legislative committee responsible for determining that funding approved only a fraction of what was requested. Justice Minister Mickey Amery, for his part, said the nearly $1.5 million approved so far seemed adequate for the one formal application underway. At the time, the file against Pitt hadn’t entered the official list. Another way to see this is that these are all signs that the law was not designed with this scale of direct democracy in mind. Yet for the petitioners, it can feel like the government is trying to undermine the public. Alberta has been here before. When the province first introduced recall in the 1930s, the law was rescinded the moment it was aimed at Premier William Aberhart himself. The Social Credit premier questioned the legitimacy of signatures, going as far as to accuse oil companies of pressuring their workers to force him out. That historical echo is hard to ignore, even though Amery has said there are no amendments or repeals “being contemplated at this time.” Setting aside whether the MLAs deserve to be recalled, or whether recall is even good or bad, the structural question that game theory makes unavoidable now is this: Can this government accept the consequences of its own accountability mechanisms when the shoe is on the other foot? The UCP built a process to allow citizens to withdraw confidence between elections. Citizens are now attempting to do exactly that. At the end of the day, recall is not about any single MLA or any single dispute. As Mark Smith himself said back in 2019: “It’s about allowing the electorate to be able to hold their MLA accountable.” If a government finds the consequences of recall difficult, the remedy is to govern in a way that maintains the confidence of the people it serves.