Calls made for legislation changes as deadline passes for petition to recall Wetaskiwin mayor

As the deadline passes for a petition to recall the mayor of Wetaskiwin, there are calls from politicians, experts and those who started the petition to change the legislation that allows the practice.

Friday at 4:30 p.m. was the deadline for people to sign the petition to recall Wetaskiwin Mayor Tyler Gandam.

In February, Wetaskiwin resident Debby Hunker issued a notice for a recall petition, saying she and other residents had lost confidence in Gandam’s ability to govern impartially. Hunker and others involved in the petition had 60 days to gather 5,062 signatures for the petition to be considered sufficient.

“We will not have enough to actually remove him from his seat,” Hunker said Friday, estimating they had collected about 1,500 signatures.

Alberta’s Municipal Government Act lets citizens recall a council member through a petition process. The act was updated by the Alberta government in 2022 to allow eligible voters to file petitions to recall politicians, including mayors and municipal councillors.

A recall petition is considered sufficient if it includes signatures from a minimum of 40 per cent of the population for the city. Only people who are eligible to vote can sign a recall petition.

“It really isn’t a failure. It’s a lack of being able to get to that threshold. It’s really an impossible threshold,” Hunker said.

2:10 Recall petition filed in Wetaskiwin

Gandam, who said he’s received a lot of community support over the last 60 days in the midst of the petition process, would like to see the legislation scrapped altogether. He said there are other ways to hold elected officials accountable, including codes of conduct and through Municipal Affairs.

“I think the legislation is being weaponized right now by members of the community for councillors who maybe don’t vote the way that somebody thinks that they should, or maybe somebody didn’t get elected and now this is their way to kind of take a shot back at those members of council,” Gandam said.

“I don’t see the need for it. We have an election every four years and if you’re doing a good job and you get reelected, that’s the way that your residents can say that, ‘yes, this is who I want representing me.’

“As it stands right now, 18 months after an election you can now try to have that member of council removed because you don’t like that they supported a budget or that they didn’t support your initiative that you presented to council.”

MacEwan University political scientist Chaldeans Mensah said he believes the legislation is flawed in two ways: the threshold is too high and the rationale that people need to provide to recall someone is not clear enough.

“It just says, ‘if the politician is not upholding their responsibilities.’ That is vague,” he said Friday. He said the way it stands now, the legislation “leaves it wide open for anybody who disagrees with a politician to simply say, ‘I’m going to recall them.’

“What we have here is people are recalling politicians because they disagree on public policy issues. That is not enough for an effective recall mechanism,” Mensah explained. “What is needed when they revamp this law is to put in solid rationale for when you can recall a politician. It has to deal with serious malfeasance, serious corruption issues. It shouldn’t be over policy disagreements.”

2:05 Calgary Mayor Gondek meets with man who launched recall petition

In late March, Premier Danielle Smith said she is considering changes to the province’s recall legislation, but added she can’t change legislation when there is an active petition underway.

Smith’s comments came as a recall petition to remove Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek was underway. That petition required more than 500,000 signatures, which is more than the number of people who voted in Calgary’s last municipal election.

“What I have observed from the process you’ve gone through is that it’s an extremely high bar to try to get the number of signatures,” Smith said to the petition’s representative, Landon Johnston, on the March 30 episode of Your Province Your Premier.

The deadline for the recall petition against Calgary’s mayor was April 4. Johnston said he counted just over 72,000 signatures on the petition. The official results are expected to be released 45 days after the April 4 deadline.

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