Colm:
postpone? this ridiculous thing should be cancelled and Canada should stop entertaining these ridiculous referenda on secession and act like every other country where this hasnt become a norm
Bailey Williamson:
Me thinks this is intentional.
All the issues in Alberta are squarely at the conservatives feet. They have been in power and ruling for so long. They’re believing their own press,time for a reset.
Geri:
I was so hoping that lack of personnel would cancel this travesty. Two things have shattered my confidence in Elections Alberta and this government: 1) the time change now negated. The ucp did not follow the will of the people. 2) the massive privacy breach of the voters list.
I agree that postponement is necessary, at least til the privacy breach is properly investigated.
Neither will happen. Smith is Trump’s twin, she believes she does no wrong, ever; it’s impossible for either of them to accept responsibility when they fuck up, which they do regularly and spectacularly.
@drjaydrno.bsky.social:
45 million ballots.
What an unmitigated fucktangle.
Well worth a read.
@hganshorn.bsky.social:
This is by design. Break all our systems, then say democracy doesn’t work
Anonymous:
… The UCP are destroying democracy one bad bill at a time, and one bad policy at a time. Democracy has to be protected, because if it isn’t, we become a dictatorship, which is what the UCP wants.
@rbardak.bsky.social:
Is it any wonder one speculates that Elections Alberta is captured, afterall the Alberta Energy Regulator broke trail.I do not trust Gord McClure one bit. To me, he smells of hanky panky diddling on the side of Smith, David Parker, and their separatists, and likely some big money. He won’t do the right thing, in my view.
Anonymous:
How about scrapping this referendum altogether? It’s not something that was even campaigned on, and it’s not something we want, from a cost factor, and from the factor of the questions being asked.
Kenny F Willis:
Holy Fuck!?!
@albertapitbull.bsky.social:
This whole process is doomed. Lots of lawyers will make lots of money for a long tine off the backs of Albertans.
Nothing the UCP does inspires confidence.
Lee:
I believe the shambles inflicted on Elections Alberta is deliberate. Why else would you insist all ballots are counted by hand, rather than by tabulators?
The UCP is ideologically committed to “Not Governing”. They do not believe in government. They are money-maddened anarcho-libertarian wreakers.
Surely no on in Alberta thinks Duh-duh-Dani and her cretins are conservatives?
They want to meddle, fiddle, tweak, weaken, interfere, and ultimately break representative government institutions and public service delivery to demonstrate “it does’t work!” Then its a slick PR campaign to essentially argue “Lets give it my private sector buddy over here for fractions of pennies on the dollar and he/she can rent-extract social service delivery like a forever tick on the neck of a dog at a huge profit”.
I wish Albertans would wake up and see these UCP snakes for what they are – grifters in for a quick buck for them and their friends. They are traitors. They are thieves.
@nigelb.bsky.social:
Wow, just wow!
From the substack of Patrick Lennox “The Chief Electoral Officer Must Postpone the Alberta Referendum”
The Chief Electoral Officer Must Postpone the Alberta Referendum, Elections Alberta is in over its head by Patrick Lennox, Sep 17, 2026
Alberta is about to undertake something never contemplated before in Canadian democracy. A ten question, ten ballot referendum is slated to take place on October 19th. By way of three executive orders issued this spring the government has decided to send the province into a direct democracy disaster.
With less than 40 days to go before the referendum it is clear that conducting this unprecedented plebiscitary experiment is so far beyond the capacity of Elections Alberta that it would be misfeasance to carry on with the vote.
In their last Annual Report Elections Alberta sounded the alarm. The agency has the lowest comparable ratio of employee to elector in Canada. This is not a mark of efficiency the report noted, but of “significant risk.” There are “systemic deficiencies to be addressed, including high turnover, insufficient resources and lack of backup in critical positions and areas, process bottlenecks, and unfilled vacancies created by turnover.” Allow me to parse the bureaucratese: things are very bleak, indeed. And that’s just the staff.
Facilities are also “over capacity”, in “disrepair”, “in space deficit”, “failing”, even. Governance and documentation, not small matters for a body charged with ensuring electoral fairness, were also flagged in the report as being at risk of running into business continuity challenges, ineffective onboarding of new staff, and “consistency in governance, procedure, and policy application.”[1] In other words, high levels of turnover and burnout and under-staffing is leading Elections Alberta to question its own abilities to deliver the steady, predictable results that underpin public faith and confidence in the province’s democratic processes.
Indeed, the report paints a bleak picture of an agency central to the political and democratic integrity of Alberta on the brink of breakdown just at the moment when the government has decided it is no longer content with representative democracy, and would prefer to do things the old fashioned way with off-electoral cycle binary votes on a bunch of anti-Canadian stuff the government was not elected to even consider.
Elections Alberta has put out a call to hire 60,000 workers to administer the referendum. This is an astonishing number of people that must be recruited, vetted, put on a pay roll, and trained by an agency that is by its own admission just struggling to keep the lights on for Alberta’s democracy.
With just over a month to go, some areas of the province like Northeast Alberta, fewer than 50 per cent of the required positions to administer the referendum have been filled.[2] Recruiting in geographically large, sparsely populated areas for temporary electoral work has always been a challenge in the province even for typical electoral events where the number of ballots required to be cast and counted is always well under the total voting population. In the last provincial general election, for example, was close to 1.8 million.
But for this referendum Elections Alberta has had to print 45 million ballots. By way of comparison, Elections Canada brought on 230,000 electoral workers to administer the 45th general election in 2025, during which less than 20 million ballots were cast and counted.[3]
The troubles of Elections Alberta have already manifested in some head scratching snafus. For example, the agency has sent out special ballot packages containing a requirement to sign a declaration stating that the voter is unable to vote at advanced polls or on Election Day. If the declaration was found to be made falsely, the voter was threatened with two years in prison or a $50,000 fine.[4]
The agency was forced to send out an email stating this had been included in the early ballot packages in error. People should just cross that bit out. Almost 300,000 requests for mail-in ballots had been made by early September. Some of these people might not have been tracking the changes to the Electoral Act that led to this error, and they may not have seen the email trying to correct it. Will their votes be suppressed as a result of this error? Might some just not risk two years in jail or a financially crippling fine for the privilege of voting in this sham referendum?
The agency is still investigating, presumably at least, the largest data breach in Canadian history, which saw the Alberta voters list illegally procured by a rogue separatist outfit called the Centurion Project. These democratic gangsters loaded the personal data—full legal names, addresses, polling stations, and in some cases emails and phone numbers—on an app designed by MAGA operatives to recruit low information low turnout voters. Some of this data was discovered long after the breach was exposed by Canada’s National Observer on American servers, unbeknownst to Elections Alberta.[5] Opps. Since then, there’s been no update from Elections Alberta on the file.
Other forms of criminal and quasi-criminal interference in the referendum process are highly unlikely to be brought to light by the agency, given its state of repair. The Alberta Prosperity Project, for example, is the largest separatist advocacy group.
Their leadership, including lawyer Jeffrey Rath, and former doctor Dennis Modry, were under investigation by Elections Alberta in the spring. The APP defied two notices from an investigator to produce financial records related to advertising it conducted in support of the petition the group led to generate a secession referendum. Once the case made it to court the injunction was adjourned without setting a date to reconvene. No reasons for this were provided.[6]
The latest news out of the agency charged with presiding over the UCP’s grand experiment in direct democracy is even more troubling, as it suggests Elections Alberta is no longer serving the public, but has rather been captured by the far right UCP government and is doing its bidding regardless of the rules.
Five former senior Elections Alberta employees have come forward and alleged, after quitting their public service jobs, that the agency mishandled the validation of the Water Not Coal petition that was led by country singer Corb Lund and aimed at banning new coal mining in the Eastern Rocky Mountain slopes. One manager and four supervisors have questioned the integrity of the validation process and its result which was to invalidate the petition due to an insufficient signature count. In addition to the five long-term Elections Alberta officials who resigned, two director level staff were terminated without cause, including the director responsible for overseeing the petition processing, according to the CBC.[7]
“We had concerns whether the process was being completed in a fair, equitable and consistent manner with the daily and sometimes hourly changes to the process,” wrote the employees who resigned due to what they cited as a workplace without trust, that “no longer was a safe environment.”[8]
First of all, credit where credit is due. These folks have precisely the courage required to defend democracy against the far right regime that has captured the provincial legislature. Good on them. We owe them a debt of gratitude.
Second, this begs the question of whether the separatist petition was properly validated. If Corb Lund’s Water not Coal petition was invalidated improperly, who is to say the separatist’s petition wasn’t validated improperly? If the rules were being changed hourly to manipulate the outcome for Water not Coal, how can we assume they were being fairly and transparently applied to the separatist petition? After all, the government changed the law on multiple occasions to facilitate a secession referendum in the fall, and ignored two court rulings saying that one would be unconstitutional. Should we be surprised if they tried to monkey with the validation of the separatist petition?
In the end of course, it was three executive orders signed by Danielle Smith alone that ginned up the October 19th festival of direct democracy here in Alberta. My view is that if the Elections Commissioner has any courage and integrity at all he’ll admit he doesn’t have the institutional wherewithal behind him to square this referendum away fairly and transparently and in a way that won’t leave a traumatic mark on people’s trust and confidence in their democratic institutions and outcomes long after October 19th.
The Chief Electoral Officer doesn’t have the authority to call off the referendum that should never have been called.
But he does have the authority to postpone it until such time as it is deemed safe to carry out. Scores of nations postponed general elections during the pandemic. Natural disasters have also been cause for pushing off democratic events. In this case, Elections Alberta must admit to being compromised both in terms of basic matters of HR, and facilities, and oversight and governance, but now due to this recent set of revelations, that its integrity has been compromised in a very serious way which puts our democracy at risk.
Elections Alberta must take a step back and admit it needs time to repair itself and its reputation, and to prepare for this unprecedented and unwanted democratic experiment it is being forced to conduct by the far right government in power.
[1] https://www.elections.ab.ca/uploads/Elections-Alberta-2024-2025-Annual-Report-WEB-compressed.pdf
[2] https://www.stalbertgazette.com/alberta-decides/northeast-alberta-referendum-staffing-still-below-50-per-cent-12759098
[3] https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=med&dir=pre&document=apr2925&lang=e
[4] https://www.ctvnews.ca/calgary/article/elections-alberta-apologizes-for-confusion-caused-by-special-ballot-packages/
[5] https://www.nationalobserver.com/2026/05/20/investigations/alberta-voter-data-10x-votes-centurion-project
[6] https://thetyee.ca/News/2026/04/17/Alberta-Prosperity-Project-Court-Date-Separation-Referendum-Role/
[7] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/elections-alberta-water-not-coal-petition-9.7347347
[8] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/elections-alberta-water-not-coal-petition-9.7347347
Danielle Smith is no separatist – she’s something even more dangerous by Jeremy Appel, Special to The Globe and Mail, Sept 18, 2026
Jeremy Appel is an Edmonton-based freelance journalist who writes The Orchard newsletter on Substack. He’s the author of the forthcoming Dark Phoenix: The Rise, Fall, and Re-emergence of Danielle Smith.
There’s an old Seinfeld episode in which Elaine speculates to Jerry that perhaps there’s more to his archnemesis Newman “than meets the eye.”
“No,” responds Jerry, “there’s less.”
I’m reminded of this exchange as Alberta barrels toward a series of referendums on Oct. 19, including the question of whether the province should hold a future referendum on secession from Canada.
It’s undeniable that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has done more to advance the cause of Alberta separatism than any premier in the province’s history. While she’s publicly stated her intention to vote to remain in Canada, don’t expect her to actively campaign for that outcome.
Many of Ms.Smith’s critics have argued that her permissive approach toward the separatist movement is evidence of a thinly veiled separatist agenda. But what if there’s less to her than meets the eye?
Ms.Smith has changed laws twice to remove barriers to separatist campaigners collecting signatures for an independence referendum while initiating nine referendum questions of her own that align with separatist grievances about immigration and the structure of Canadian federalism.
After the Court of King’s Bench nullified the independence petition because the government failed to consult First Nations before approving it, Ms.Smith circumvented the ruling by scheduling a referendum on whether to remain in Canada or prepare for a future binding independence referendum.
In attempting to explain Ms.Smith’s behaviour, Alberta’s NDP Opposition has stated flatly that “Danielle Smith is a separatist” who “wants Alberta to leave Canada.” So too has Canada’s National Observer columnist Max Fawcett and Mount Royal University political scientist Keith Brownsey.
Opinion: With five weeks to go before Alberta’s referendum vote, where is the pro-Canada campaign?
Ms.Smith has given these critics ample justification for this suspicion, but I suspect her true motivation is equal measures more banal and more troubling than what her opponents allege.
Rather than the committed ideologue Ms.Smith’s critics often portray her as, a close look at her career in media and politics reveals that she is little more than a political opportunist whose primary ambition is wielding state power to reward her allies and discipline her enemies.
As far back as 2005, Ms.Smith argued in the Calgary Herald that the province should hold an independence referendum if Ottawa doesn’t agree to adopt a U.S.-style Triple-E Senate, weaken the power of unelected judges and phase out transfer payments to provinces. “Either way, Alberta would get the federal system it wants,” she wrote ominously.
Even 20 years ago, before Ms.Smith was on anybody’s radar as a potential provincial politician, she advocated instrumentalizing the threat of an independence referendum to fundamentally restructure Canada.
It’s one thing to make this case as a newspaper columnist for provocation’s sake, but the separatist threat is now being wielded by Ms. Smith to advance public subsidies for a new bitumen pipeline to the B.C. coast and a carbon capture project favoured by Canada’s biggest oil companies. She’s found a willing partner in Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has overseen a simultaneous gutting of Canadian climate policy to advance industry’s prerogatives.They’re both racist Nazi fuckers
Advancing separatist ambitions is a means to an end; the end is simply power. But it’s not Ms.Smith who’s actually in charge. She’s just the friendly conduit for the forces that brought her into the position she’s in.
A significant portion of Ms. Smith’s voters, if not outright majority, would vote to separate from Canada. Ms.Smith has all but admitted that in order to remain Premier, she needs to give these voters an outlet so that they feel respected, lest they migrate to an avowedly separatist party.and heavenly split the vote resulting in Smith getting punted out on her corrupt selfish Trump-like ass.
But she wouldn’t be secure in her role if she only appealed to her rural reactionary base that supports separatism.
The secret of her thus-far enduring electoral success is advancing her base’s grievances and using her considerable communicative talents, honed through her years as a radio and TV host, to translate them into terms that are palatable to less ideologically strident voters in suburban Calgary.
This is why she’s done everything she can to ensure that there’s some sort of referendum on independence while maintaining a politically healthy detachment from its outcome.
If Ms.Smith sensed that becoming an outright separatist would help her maintain power, she would espouse that position in a heartbeat, selling it as a compromise between two imaginary extremes.
That doesn’t make her a committed separatist. It makes her a committed self-preservationist. This distinction is crucial in understanding the threat she poses not just to Alberta but Canada.
