@spicyerin.bsky.social:
Go Corb!!!!!
@mandalamushroom.bsky.social:
YES!! It’s good for everyone!
Can we donate somewhere to help with legal costs?
yes:
https://secure.waternotcoal.ca
@slightlycaustic.bsky.social:
I don’t love or even like country music but I love Corb Lund. Met him once when I was on the opening team of the Stoney Nakoda Resort in Morley Alberta and he was filming a music video. All around stand up guy.
@jeffthompson48.bsky.social:
Corb is awesome!!! He went from heavy rock with the Smalls to a great country career. He is also a very sweet man.
Corb Lund says government was ‘crooked’ with anti-coal petition, as new poll backs his stance, A new poll by Marc Henry’s ThinkHQ shows that 52 per cent of Albertans want a ban on new coal projects. by Don Braid, Aug 5, 2026, Calgary Herald
Corb Lund has gone from disappointed to puzzled to suspicious, and now just plain angry.
His anti-coal petition, rejected by Elections Alberta, hangs in limbo while he waits for a court review.
“The government’s treatment of our petition has been dishonest,” says Lund, the famous country crooner who headed the petition to ban new coal mines on the Eastern Slopes of the Rockies.
“It’s crooked as far as I’m concerned.”
As for the whole referendum process, “they’ve changed the rules three times. It’s crazy. It’s absolute chaos.”
There’s no doubt about Albertans’ view of Eastern Slopes mining.
A new poll by Marc Henry’s ThinkHQ shows that 52 per cent of Albertans want a ban on new coal projects.
If Lund’s question went to a referendum, Henry says, “a two-to-one majority of Albertans would vote in favour of a question banning new coal mining operations in the Eastern Slopes, put forward by the group Water Not Coal.That’s why little maid of billionaire Gina Rinehart’s, Danielle Smith, will never allow Corb’s question to go to any referendum, now or next year or the next.
“One-quarter would oppose it (a ban) and one-quarter are unsure how they would vote.”
In a fair system, Lund’s question would be headed for the Oct. 19 ballot.
But this isn’t a fair fight.
Lund’s petition gathered 196,192 signatures that were deemed “valid” by Elections Alberta.
They needed only 177,732 to get the question on the ballot.
It looked like a sure thing for Lund’s group. But then Elections Alberta got down to business.
After phoning 384 people, they determined that only 172,088 signatures were “verified.”
Pollster Henry says that’s statistically cockeyed.That’s Smith alright, and her boy McClure at Elections Alberta Any judge is likely to throw the ruling out.
“If you take into account the margin of error — plus or minus five, based on a sample of 384 calls — Elections Alberta is not able to say they didn’t hit the threshold. By their own numbers, there could be 180,000 verified signatures.”
The statistical solution, Henry says, is to call a lot more people who signed the petition — at least 1,500. But Elections Alberta didn’t do that.
Lund still doesn’t believe anything crooked is going on at Elections Alberta. I don’t, either.I do
The problem there appears to be overwork and underfunding. And yet, that’s the outfit that will run a provincewide referendum with 10 separate questions on Oct. 19.
Lund says he had a meeting with Premier Danielle Smith about his petition. She didn’t mention anything about a deadline for getting on the ballots, he recalls.
“But as soon as it looked like we had the signatures, all of a sudden there was this zombie deadline that we’ve never been informed of.”ha ha ha! “Zombie deadline” is best description ever for sneaky slimy shit pulled by Smith
Smith had previously suggested the question might be accepted, but later said there wasn’t enough time.Bullshit hillbilly Smith. Remove one of your racist rile your base immigrant questions, and replace it with Corb’s. Easy Peasy, time not needed
Meanwhile, a government-written separatist question is on the ballot, even though the original version is still tied up in the courts on grounds that First Nations were not consulted.Dirty fucker douche Smith, stole the Forever Canadian petition, to use as support for the separatist question. Doesn’t get much more dirty than that
The government could easily ask a question similar to Lund’s on its own initiative. What’s good enough for the separatists should be fine for him, too.
Ya, but, Smith doesn’t serve honest trustworthy land and water protecting Albertans, especially not those that care about others. She serves the selfish rich; American women and child abusing AI; earth raping American oil and gas and frac companies; American pedophiles – especially the idiot who slathers on too much orange face make up and lies like she does; religious terrorist Davie Parker (who stole and abused the private voter data of nearly three million Albertans, then ran away to USA, cowardly shit that he is); and lying racist misogynistic bigoted stupid angry greedy really really stupid separatists (can’t do math, law or history and can’t budget well enough to live on over $100,000.00 annual income – I guess ’cause they can’t do math).
No way that will happen, with new coal so high on the government’s radar.
On July 31, the province issued permits allowing expansion by some 630 hectares of the Coalspur open pit operations near Hinton. If fully developed, it will be the largest thermal coal operation in North America.
Lund’s petition would be very awkward in that context.
The premier, meanwhile, is extremely frustrated by the court ruling that there must be Indigenous consultation over any referendum question on separation.Racist shit that she is.
She’d have to consult on nearly any question, she told a gathering in Red Deer, and then get approval from the House of Commons.
“That’s why we’re challenging the approach that the court came down with.
“We may as well repeal the legislation because, virtually, there’s no question you can imagine where an Indigenous community would not make that argument, and so that’s why we’re challenging.
“Heck, the citizens’ initiative ballot may as well be repealed.”
Great idea.
Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald
Jack Hill:
Conservatives governments are always crooked; becasue their priority is oppressing the population with ideology rather than serving their population. Remember Mulroney and his little brown envelope.why are conservative voters so often extremely religious, racist, bigoted, misogynistic, and greedy?
Frank Rossi:
Smith said “there wasn’t enough time” for this petition, but when it comes to her separatists friends, she gives them all the time and publicity in the world.
It’s time for Smith to step down, or be forced to step down.
In Alberta, Referendums Must Serve Smith’s Aims Only, Witness the battle over the Water Not Coal petition as Corb Lund leads a fight to keep it alive by Andrew Nikiforuk, Aug 3, 2026, The Tyee
Tyee contributing editor Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning journalist whose books and articles focus on epidemics, the energy industry, nature and more.
Few issues provide a clearer window on Alberta’s top-down politics than coal mining.
The latest chapter in a long saga sheds more light on Premier Danielle Smith’s pretend support for bottom-up democracy like citizen-initiated referendums.
Indeed, the way Smith works to centralize political authority in a petrostate offers similarities to how Vladimir Putin governs. The Russians call it “the vertical of power.”
Let’s begin with the Water Not Coal referendum petition drive led by country music singer and ranch owner Corb Lund. After he and his team concluded they had the required signatures and made their submission, Elections Alberta decided last month to quash it.
The Water Not Coal referendum, had Albertans voted for it, would have banned coal mining in the Rocky Mountains to protect critical watersheds, including Valory Resources’ giant underground Blackstone proposal and the controversial Grassy Mountain project owned by Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart.
Smith is an ardent supporter of coal mining, so Lund and all who signed the petition were daring to defy the will of the premier and her United Conservative Party government.
After 3,000 canvassers circulated the petition across the province for four months, Lund submitted 207,435 signatures to Elections Alberta. Approximately six per cent of the voting population of Alberta signed the petition.
According to the 2021 Citizen Initiative Act, Lund needed approximately 178,000 signatures to spark a public referendum on the coal issue or force the government to make legislative changes.
Then Elections Alberta, which was created to bebut clearly is not because of how it coddles and protects law violating separatists, Smith’s wee babiesa non-partisan and independent office of the legislative assembly, got to work. Its review concluded that only 196,088 signatures were valid and of those only 172,088 were verified based on a random sample of 384 signatures. Water Not Coal was a no go.
‘Unreasonably rejected’
But on Thursday, Lund filed a judicial review application saying Elections Alberta arrived at the shortfall “in a procedurally unfair manner.” The agency is accused of not only misinterpreting the Citizen Initiative Act but using unreasonable verification rules and applying a flawed statistical sampling model that resulted in a process that overcounted invalid signatures and undercounted valid ones. On that basis Lund argues that Elections Alberta’s decision to nix the petition was both incorrect and unreasonable.
Lund’s application singles out the agency for “creating or imposing higher or stricter standards in the validation process relating both to electors and canvassers than were required by the statutory scheme, resulting in signatures being unreasonably rejected, thereby frustrating the underlying purpose of the [Citizen Initiative Act] which is to encourage citizen participation in direct democratic initiatives.”
In a statement Lund noted that “more than 200,000 Albertans signed the petition in good faith and they deserve a fair and reasonable process.”
“We believe Elections Alberta applied standards that were stricter than the law requires, and that thousands of Albertans were effectively shut out by verification processes that don’t make sense,” he said in the statement. “This judicial review is about ensuring that citizens’ voices weren’t lost in technicalities.”
Lund and his lawyers weren’t the only ones to notice that things didn’t add up during Elections Alberta’s process. Jeffrey Rosenthal, a professor of statistics at the University of Toronto, looked at the same numbers and analyzed them for CBC.
“It seems that their sampling method is seriously flawed and could vastly underestimate the percentage of valid signatories,” he said.
Separatists reported the same issues after Elections Alberta put their petition through the same validation and verification process last month. The agency counted 286,593 signatures but found only 279,337 valid. Statistical sampling later whittled that figure down to 222,597 as verified.
Although the Stay Free Alberta petition was approved, the separatists aren’t happy with what they call a questionable and bureaucratic process and have called for a full legislative review.
According to Stay Free Alberta, “Electors were recorded as failed verifications despite clearly remembering signing, simply because they could not recall minor details months later, such as the exact signing period, whether they showed identification, or whether a unit number appeared on their address.”
A press release added this important explainer: “Because each sampled verification was statistically weighted, a single rejection affected the validity of more than 700 signatures, and electors were never warned. None of the discrepancies suggested a signature was fraudulent or that the wrong person was contacted.”
Moving the goalposts to win
The tangled story doesn’t end here. Smith’s government has a chronic habit of changing the rules for citizen-initiated referendums and other election laws. Since 2023 her government has amended the act three times. One prominent amendment lowered signature requirements to 10 per cent of general election turnout — a move that appeased separatists in Smith’s party and paved the way for an independence referendum.
Another amendment changed the rules once again because Smith didn’t like a court ruling that challenged the constitutional validity of a proposed referendum that would replace the Canadian Constitution with an Alberta one, and all without First Nations consultation.
As a consequence, Smith centralized her government’s control over the act by reducing the duties of chief electoral officer. Changes also pointedly removed “the ability in the act to refer questions about citizen initiative proposals to the court.”
These timely amendments, made last December, also had the effect of killing Lund’s first application for a Water Not Coal petition, which started before the changes. As a result of Smith’s tinkering, Lund had to start the whole process over again in January.
Smith has boasted about her support for citizen-initiated referendums and how they empower regular folks to make democratic change. But when the premier realized that Lund’s anti-coal petition would cross the threshold of 178,000 signatures last June, she abruptly changed her friendly tune.
The Water Not Coal petition question had the potential to be the only one generated not by her government technocrats but by citizens. After repeatedly promising it would appear on the province’s controversial October ballot, Smith twice stepped backwards.
Although Smith declared in a major speech last May that “muzzling the voices of hundreds of thousands of Albertans wanting to be heard is unjustifiable in a free and democratic society,” she did just that.
Smith said there was no way the Water Not Coal question would ever appear on the ballot this year. Maybe next year. No guarantees.
In another one of her verbose press conferences Smith justified the delay by explaining that there was a long and winding process for the coal referendum question that would involve hearings and legal advice. In other words, a non-partisan petition with 200,000 names carried no weight in a government that changes laws and rules to benefit coal oligarchs.
Smith then explained that banning coal mining in the eastern slopes would raise issues of property rights and the government would have to study that — implying that the property rights of a rich Australian coal baron matters more than those of ordinary Albertan water drinkers.
The premier also implied that the government would have to consider the results of a local coal referendum in the municipal district of Crowsnest Pass before making any decisions.
That 2024 referendum stands as a master class in how to exert the vertical of power to undermine a democracy. Smith directly encouraged the vote, knowing it could legitimize her government’s support for a dead and rejected coal project owned by Rinehart, the richest person in Australia.
Not surprisingly, the people of Crowsnest Pass, an old coal mining district, voted in favour of the Grassy Mountain mine. During the run-up, Rinehart’s company supported their athletic clubs and even drove voters to the polls.
But the referendum was designed to obfuscate an inconvenient geographical truth. The proposed open-pit mine is located in a neighbouring municipal district where ranchers remain overwhelmingly opposed to it. Smith thought it was OK for citizens to vote on a project not in their own municipal district while 200,000 water drinkers living downstream of the project had no representation whatsoever.
Referendums as ‘arms of the government’
So even before Elections Alberta put the Water Not Coal signatures through its problematic statistical modelling, Smith had shown her hand. Every citizen-initiated referendum must become a Smith question with a desired outcome. The message is plain. A Smith autocracy works well for coal developers, AI data centres, oil barons and natural gas producers. But not for citizens who wish to question these priorities.
This explains why none of the 10 questions on constitution and immigration being forced on Albertans this fall are the product of citizen initiatives.
Even the independence question is a complete Smith invention. The 400,000 Albertans who supported the Forever Canadian petition did so because they didn’t believe an independence referendum was justified or legitimate.
But Smith couldn’t respect that citizen initiative either. Thomas Lukaszuk, who began that petition, has repeatedly noted: “Our question is not on the referendum [ballot]…. It is the premier’s question. It’s not our question.”
In Smith’s rather Russian world, referendums exist only to expand the power of a ruling party and are open to endless manipulation. Scholars have a name for this practice: “Referendums as extended arms of the government.”
That’s the cynical game being played in Alberta
‘Water Not Coal’ petition organizer files for judicial review following unsuccessful bid, The organizer for the ‘Water Not Coal’ petition has filed for a judicial review, challenging a decision from the Chief Electoral Officer that its citizen-led petition was unsuccessful. by Michael Ranger, Jul 30, 2026, City News
Country musician Corb Lund and his advocacy group Water Not Coal have launched a legal challenge against Elections Alberta, asking the courts to review the decision to reject a citizen-led initiative aimed at banning new coal mining projects on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains.
The court application follows Elections Alberta’s early July ruling that the petition failed to meet the threshold required under the province’s Citizen Initiative Act, despite organizers submitting more than 207,000 signatures in support of the proposal.
Water Not Coal is arguing the decision was unfair and runs counter to the intent of the legislation designed to encourage public participation in democracy. The group alleges Elections Alberta applied overly strict standards when validating signatures, required voters to accurately recall details months after signing, and relied on a flawed statistical sampling process to determine whether enough signatures were valid.
“More than 200,000 Albertans signed this petition in good faith, and they deserve a fair and reasonable process,” said Lund in a statement. “We believe Elections Alberta applied standards that were stricter than the law requires, and that thousands of Albertans were effectively by shut out by verification processes that don’t make sense.
“This judicial review is about ensuring that citizens’ voices weren’t lost in technicalities.”
The application also raises concerns about Elections Alberta’s verification phone calls and the potential impact of a recent data breach on the petition review process.
The group is asking the court to either overturn the decision or order Elections Alberta to reconsider the petition.
Elections Alberta ruled petition did not meet legal threshold
Lund’s legal challenge comes weeks after Elections Alberta ruled the initiative fell short of the required number of verified signatures.
The agency said that while 196,088 signatures were initially accepted as valid, a statistical review estimated that only 172,088 signatures could be verified. That left the campaign roughly 5,000 signatures short of the 177,732 required under the Citizen Initiative Act.
Elections Alberta has defended its review, saying it conducts a rigorous verification process to ensure compliance with provincial law.I find Elections Alberta, notably McClure, to be untrustworthy cowards, illegally cowering and catering to Smith’s demands to serve the racist Fucker Trucker separatists and thus Nazi USA, while being grossly unfair to the Water not Coal petitioners.
The agency has said signatures can be rejected for reasons including incomplete information, duplicate entries and invalid witness declarations. Officials have maintained that the statistical sampling method used to assess petitions is authorized under the legislation.So what? That does not mean it’s fair, accurate or legal. Smith’s laws are bigoted anti water, anti life anti environment shit.
Under the Citizen Initiative Act, petitions that meet the required threshold can advance to Alberta’s legislature for further consideration.
The petition sought to prohibit future coal mining development on Alberta’s eastern slopes, a region that supplies drinking water to millions of people across the Prairies and has been the focus of years of debate over resource development and environmental protection.
Lund has become one of the most prominent public voices opposing renewed coal development in the region.
Premier Danielle Smith has said the provincial government has already taken significant steps to address public concerns surrounding coal development and environmental protection.
She also claims her government continues to work on coal policy and regulatory rules governing future mining proposals.
With files from The Canadian Press
@ctheriault.bsky.social:
NEW:
Corb Lund officially files a judicial review challenging the Chief Electoral Officer’s decision to deem the Water Not Coal Citizens’ Initiative unsuccessful.
The reasons? He argues the decision was unreasonable, procedurally unfair, and inconsistent with purpose of Citizen Initiative Act.
@nigelb.bsky.social:
Premier Smith is not going to like today’s SCC decision affirming that “the legality of every aspect of an administrative decision, and every exercise of public power, is subject to the supervision of the courts”
Be you ever so high Premier, the law is above you.
Democracy Watch 2026 SCC 28
@oldmikey.bsky.social:
“It is a great day for the rule of law in Canada”.
Corb Lund Calls Bullshit on Alberta’s Rigged Referendum Rules by David Berry, July 5, 2026, issue 15 of Forward Weekly
It’s fair to say that Corb Lund is no longer a hurtin’ Albertan — he’s a pissed-off one.
On June 10, he submitted a petition bearing more than 200,000 signatures directing the provincial government to hold a referendum on banning coal mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Water Not Coal, the latest chapter in Lund’s six-year fight against Alberta’s coal policy, took eight months of organizing, with nearly 3,000 volunteer canvassers hosting more than 6,000 signing events — to say nothing of the professional cost to the country singer.
Less than a week later, Premier Danielle Smith announced it would not be among the 10 controversial questions her government is putting on the October ballot. Despite meeting the statutory June 10 deadline for collecting signatures, she said it missed an unannounced June 1 deadline set by Elections Alberta to qualify for the October ballot. So, at best, Smith said a decision whether to validate the petition will be tabled for 2027.
That was news to Lund, who said it was the first anyone involved with the petition campaign had heard of the supposed deadline, even after a face-to-face meeting with the Premier on May 11.
Contacted by Forward Weekly, the Premier’s press secretary Sam Blackett said the government wasn’t informed by Elections Alberta of the June 1 deadline until after Smith’s meeting with Lund, but did not clarify when it learned of the deadline or whether it had been shared with petition organizers. Then, on Friday morning, the agency announced the petition had failed verification. Using statistical sampling, it estimated the campaign fell roughly 5,000 valid signatures short of the threshold, ending its bid for a referendum.
Forward Weekly spoke with Lund last week, before the announcement. He reflected on what he saw as a manipulated process, the government’s handling of the campaign and Alberta’s version of direct democracy.
Have you heard anything more on the matter from the government?
We weren’t told anything except for what we heard in the press. It’s this magical deadline that was never part of anything we were ever told. The entire petition process has been vague and ever-changing, and it feels manipulated to me.
I’m not naive. I know that politicians lie constantly. I guess I come from a different world where you keep your word when you’ve said something to someone’s face. Danielle Smith is pretending that we needed to go through this bureaucratic purgatory to get our question on the referendum ballot, but she’s shown that she can put whatever she wants there on a whim. She was in public, a number of times, expressing her deep conviction and belief in direct democracy — and specifically named our petition as something that would be on the October ballot if we got our numbers.
But I’ll tell you, that kind of chaos and finger-on-the-scale, flip-flopping and favouritism is very, very consistent with how the entire process has been handled for the last six years that I’ve been fucking involved with it.
As you say, you’ve been involved with the opposition to coal mining on the Eastern Slopes for many years now. What was it that made you think that organizing a petition was the best way to advance this cause?
Because we tried absolutely everything else: We’ve tried writing MLAs. I’ve met with every possible minister. I’ve met with the other parties. I’ve met with coal CEOs. I met with the coal lobbyists, the head of the Coal Association of Canada. We’ve had marches, media events, music videos, a social media campaign, but, you know, these people don’t listen.
Then we were at a water-oriented town hall with Smith in June 2025 that was very contentious. The crowd was very anti-coal and it was pretty rowdy. At the end of it, she looked us in the eye and said, ‘If you guys really want to change it, have a citizen’s initiative.’ So we did.
Yours was the third petition that was submitted to the government. The other two being Forever Canadian, which is upset about how their petition was used to justify the government’s version of the separation question, and, of course, Stay Free Alberta’s petition — which has a host of issues, but still, they’re upset with what’s being done with their petition. And now, Water Not Coal is not even on the ballot. What does that say to you about the referendum legislation that this government introduced?
Bullshit. It’s bullshit. This whole process is clearly designed to give the government cover to do what they want. When I met with the Premier May 11th, one of my specific asks was, we would like to have as much editorial control over our questions on the referendum ballot that they have over the nine or, now, 10 questions that they’ve proposed — because they were all framed in a very particular way by the government. She said, ‘Well no, you don’t get editorial control, because like all the other questions we have a particular outcome we want to have.’ I thought that was supposed to be the inside voice, right? (The Premier’s press secretary did not address this claim in its written response to Forward Weekly.)
And I don’t know if that’s because she’s in a bubble and doesn’t remember what her job is or if it’s just raw hubris and narcissism or what, but that’s not what a referendum is supposed to be.
I’m in a very small club of people in the province who have been proponents of these citizen initiated petitions. We all have different points of view, but I suspect that we would actually agree on the fact that the legislation written around them is completely haphazard. It’s like they throw this shit together because it’s flopped and changed and morphed and loopholed so many times. I don’t know how much of this is on purpose — some diabolical intention — and how much of it is just incompetence.Smith is a sadist like her hero Trump, she loves to make others suffer. I think her referendum shit is to primarily abuse pro democracy citizens, exhaust them, get hopes up by fooling people into thinking something reasonable might be done, only to crash those hopes, and to eat up the savings of the Albertans opposed to her rape and pillage for Nazi American, Nazi Australian billion dollar profit raping corps, leaving our water air and lands toxic. Doing the work for the Water not Coal and Forever Canada petitions is expensive and completely paid for by citizens.
Given that even you don’t know where the petition goes from here, where do you go from here?
We’re asking for a complete moratorium on all new coal mining activity, including exploration, in any of the Eastern Slopes area, until this is resolved.
We’ve got over 10 percent of the Alberta voting public’s support, so this is no longer some fringe issue. This is a serious thing, and it was done using the government’s own mechanisms. We went through every loophole and every roadblock and change. And every way they tried to screw with us, we followed all the rules to a T and we succeeded.
The government must respect that by having a moratorium on all the coal activity until this is resolved.
After Elections Alberta announced that the Water Not Coal petition had failed verification, we requested an updated comment from Lund but did not receive one in time. He released a statement on Facebook late Friday saying, “We are simultaneously shocked by this outcome, yet, unfortunately, not surprised, given the continual government rule changes and roadblocks we have faced throughout this campaign.”