Calgary city clerk outlines next steps in recall petition process

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Calgary’s city clerk’s office is in full preparation mode as it gets set to receive the results of a resident’s petition attempt to recall Mayor Jyoti Gondek next week.

By 4:30 p.m. on or before April 4, local business owner Landon Johnston must bring his collected signatures to the Elections Calgary office on 22nd Street N.E.

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The arrival of those signatures triggers a process in accordance with the Alberta government’s recall legislation, which city clerk Kate Martin outlined to media on Wednesday.

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She said the city clerk’s office is planning to hire up to 10 election clerks who will assist her office in counting — and if necessary, verifying — the signatures.

“We’ve gone through a number of processes to determine how the count will proceed (and) we’ve gone through processes to make sure we have capacity on the day the petition is due,” Martin told reporters.

The threshold to formally recall Mayor Gondek is 514,284 verified signatures, which is equivalent to 40 per cent of Calgary’s population as of the 2019 census. Those who signed the petition must be Calgary residents 18 years old or older, whose signatures were witnessed by a commissioner of oaths and included an affidavit.

Last Friday, Johnston told media he had counted roughly 42,000 signatures to date, but still had “another stack” to tally.

Regardless of whether the petition reaches the threshold, Martin said the city has committed to counting the total number of signatures Johnston submits.

But the public won’t know the results of that count for quite some time, as Martin said the city has 45 days to process the petitions, and won’t be updating the public throughout the process.

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If the total falls short of the legislated threshold, she said Alberta’s recall legislation does not require the city to verify those signatures.

But if the petition does garner the required number of signatures, Martin said the city clerk’s office would then have to verify the results to determine if the petition is deemed sufficient or not.

Instead of verifying each signature individually, Martin said the clerk’s office staff would use a random statistical sampling method with a 95 per cent confidence level to determine the petition’s overall sufficiency.

She noted the sample would include 369 randomly selected signatures, which would be judged against a criteria system to evaluate if they were valid and collected properly.

The sample size was determined after the city consulted with Leger, the public opinion polling organization, as a third party.

The team would then extrapolate that data to estimate the overall total of valid signatures, Martin said.

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“The legislation is very prescriptive in terms of what the city clerk must be counting,” she said. “Things we’ll be looking for — does each page of the recall petition contain the notice of the recall, as set out in the act? Does the petition include names? Does it include an address? Is each signature witnessed? We’ll also be looking for an affidavit.”

At the end of the 45-day process, Martin said a special meeting of city council will be called for after May 18. At that meeting, Martin will verbally report the unverified total as well as if the petition is deemed sufficient or insignificant. The declaration would also posted on the Elections Calgary website.

If the petition is deemed sufficient, Gondek would be recalled immediately and the deputy mayor would then take over her presiding duties. A mayoral byelection would then have to be held within 180 days — likely taking place in September, according to Martin.

She noted Gondek would be eligible to run in that bylection.

Under the Alberta legislation, politicians can only face one recall attempt per four-year term.

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