Alberta's recall legislation gains traction

One intriguing aspect of this month's moral frenzy about jet-setting politicians and officials is that it may cement voter recall of legislators in Alberta law at last. The idea of voters being able to petition for the immediate removal of an MLA is a Western dream that has long circulated around Alberta politics without ever managing to land comfortably, as it did in B.C. in 1995.

It is almost as if Alberta, the one place in Canada where direct democracy would be expected on cultural grounds to take hold, has had special antibodies acting against recall law. Recall was part of the United Farmers' grassroots-created electoral platform in the run-up to Alberta's 1921 election. The naive agricultural party obliterated all opposition in the election, and was not too naive to notice that introducing recall would immediately create opportunities to lose an airtight majority.

Something similar happened when Social Credit took power in the 1930s; Bible Bill Aberhart had the strength of principle to actually pass a recall law, but when a petition was cheekily brought against Aberhart himself, the relevant legislation was repealed … retroactive to the date of its coming-into-force.

In 1993 Alberta's Liberal party, at a moment when it seemed poised to take power in a cakewalk, adopted voter recall as part of its platform. When new Conservative leader Ralph Klein saved the party's bacon by annihilating the odious MLA pensions of the time, Liberals continued to introduce private members' bills enabling recall — and so did some of Klein's Reform Party-influenced Conservative backbenchers. It never came to anything. Recall continued to be an Alberta Liberal platform plank, and continued to be rejected by Conservative governments, as the red team declined from its historic '93 peak.

Now Premier Jason Kenney, perhaps the last Old Reform torchbearer in Canadian politics, has won on a promise of recall legislation and is prepared to bring it in at a fairly early moment. A special legislature committee on “democratic accountability” brought in a design for the law in November. The committee includes Tracy Allard, the fired minister who has become famous nationwide for her Yuletide tradition of Hawaiian volcano worship; other members include Jeremy Nixon, also caught pumice-handed in Hawaii over the holidays, and Tanya Fir, who had important holiday business in Las Vegas that will, according to tradition, stay in Vegas.

In retrospect, these people seem to have been very careful not to make recall too powerful an instrument. Back in the 1990s, proposals for Alberta recall legislation involved petition thresholds of 10 or 20 per cent of a riding's voters.

The committee plan adopts B.C.'s threshold of 40 per cent — that is, 40 per cent of a constituency's eligible voters would have to sign a petition before a byelection was triggered.

B.C.'s recall law has, famously, never actually been used; of the 26 attempts at petitions there, six attained the required number of signatures, but five proved to have too many invalid signatures after checking, and in the sixth case — that of Paul Reitsma, who had a habit of writing deranged sock-puppet letters to newspapers — the MLA saw the lay of the land and resigned. That should actually count as a success for the idea of recall; even if the formalities are never completed, recall campaigns can still give voters a useful opportunity to send a warning to a parliamentary deputy.

But the Alberta democratic accountability committee was not content to advocate for B.C.'s high petitioning threshold. They also adopted B.C.'s rules that protect MLAs from facing recall for 18 months after a general election, and from facing a second recall petition if they have survived one since the last general election.

And then, perhaps as some committee members dreamed of their imminent vacations in the sunshine, they went even further. In B.C. law, if a recall petition meets the legal standard and has all the i's dotted, the MLA's seat immediately becomes vacant and a byelection is held. Since the target of the petition is free to run for his seat again, this ought not to be a problem; legislatures can, after all, expel members outright on their own motion without consulting the public.

But the Alberta committee was spooked by the idea of allowing a seat to be vacated instantly. ( Wonder why!) Their version of B.C. recall intercedes a separate “recall election” to decide whether there will be a byelection. And even if the ousted MLA loses that recall ballot, he can still run in the byelection.

In other words, if the committee's report ends up being framed in legislation, Alberta will have an even weaker version of weaksauce B.C. recall. The premier, of course, doesn't have to follow every jot and tittle of the committee's advice. He could write the legislation so as to adopt a lower threshold than B.C.'s 40 per cent, or he could throw out the committee's idea for superfluous “recall elections,” or he could do both. It is also up to him whether the recall legislation will take effect immediately, or only after Alberta's next general election. But I think we know where he'll end up on that particular point.

Ralph Klein