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EDMONTON — Alberta’s chief electoral officer has taken custody of a citizen initiative petition seeking a referendum on provincial independence, but the process to determine whether it meets the legal threshold is now stalled by the courts.
Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure said the petition and accompanying signature sheets were received May 2 after the collection period closed. The documents have since been sealed, signed and placed in locked storage under continuous security monitoring while verification remains on hold.
The pause stems from an April 10 injunction issued by the Alberta Court of King’s Bench in response to a legal challenge from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Blackfoot Confederacy. The order prevents Elections Alberta from certifying the petition until a full judicial review is completed.
If the stay is lifted, Elections Alberta will have 21 days to carry out a detailed verification process aimed at achieving a 95 per cent confidence level. Officials say the review includes validating each signature and canvasser witness statement, removing duplicates and, where necessary, applying additional scrutiny if anomalies are detected.
The process has also been updated to include checks for “seeded names” tied to concerns about potential misuse of the province’s list of electors. If any of those names appear in the petition, officials say further investigation will follow.
The proposed referendum question asks Albertans whether the province should cease to be part of Canada and become an independent state.
Signature totals for the independence petition have not yet been publicly confirmed by Elections Alberta, and will only be known once verification is complete.
The effort is unfolding alongside a competing citizen initiative earlier this year which asked Albertans whether the province should remain in Canada. That petition gathered more than 404,000 signatures in just 90 days, making it the largest citizen-initiated petition in Alberta’s history and providing a point of comparison as the independence question moves forward.
Under Alberta’s Citizen Initiative Act, a successful constitutional petition must meet strict thresholds for valid signatures, with the verification process designed to ensure accuracy and guard against irregularities.
Meanwhile, some of the organizers of the petition are facing scrutiny amid an ongoing investigation into a potential breach of voter data.
Elections Alberta has said it is examining whether a pro-separation group may have improperly handled access to the province’s list of electors, which contains personal information on roughly 2.9 million registered voters.
The RCMP has confirmed it is also investigating, while officials stress the group under review is separate from the organization that submitted the petition. Still, observers say the controversy has exposed divisions within the broader separatist movement and could affect its credibility as the process unfolds.
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