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Elections Alberta has issued three more recall petitions for legislature members — two United Conservative backbenchers and one Opposition New Democrat.
That brings the current total of active petitions to 26 — 24 of those are for UCP politicians, which is more than half of Premier Danielle Smith’s 47-member caucus.
Ron Wiebe and Justin Wright are both first-term UCP legislature members.
MLA Peggy Wright, the second NDP member to face a petition, serves as labour critic.
The petitioners looking to oust Wiebe and Justin Wright say in statements that they’re motivated in part because the politicians supported the government’s legislation that forced striking teachers back to work earlier this year.
The government also imposed a contract that teachers had previously rejected.
“An MLA’s duty is to defend the rights of the people they represent, not to strip them away,” Wiebe’s petitioner, Debbie Harris, said in a statement submitted with her petition application.
“Because his vote violates this core responsibility, this recall petition is being initiated.”
Harris, who is a teacher in Grande Prairie County, told CBC News she met with Wiebe to express her concerns about the use of the notwithstanding clause in Bill 2, which ended October’s teachers’ strike.
She said he would not promise that the government wouldn’t use it again. The following week the government invoked the clause on three laws affecting transgender children, youth and adults.
Harris now has to collect 12,000 signatures by March 23. She said she has talked to others who share her frustrations.
“This recall is an opportunity for us to be able to do what we can to make a change in Alberta,” she said. “Even if we’re not successful, I think that it still is an opportunity to raise awareness on these issues.”
MLAs shouldn’t blame others: petitioner
Holly Turnbull, the petitioner asking to have Wright removed, said in her application that she was motivated by the UCP member’s lack of action on coal mining and health-care concerns.
In an interview with CBC News, Turnbull said she decided to take action after Wright voted in favour of bills that used the notwithstanding clause.
Wright, in a statement to Elections Alberta, said he has advocated for health care by organizing meetings with ministers and raising issues through other channels.
“I have consistently represented constituent interests through active legislative participation and community engagement,” he said.
Turnbull also said in her application that Wright said in the legislature that the RCMP took 36 hours to respond to reports of a dead body in a car, an allegation the police service said is not true. She said Wright never corrected the record.
In an interview with CBC News on Tuesday, Wright said he received the information from Cypress County.
“I read directly from a letter that was received from Cypress County and in regards to situations where they were expressing that they were informed they did not receive police coverage,” Wright said. “I will stand by the Cypress County officials who penned that letter and sent [it] to myself. ”
Turnbull said that response isn’t good enough.
“As a leader, when we misspeak or maybe make an error, we own it, ” she said. “We don’t then just cast the blame on someone else for having given us the information that we took into the legislature.”
The petitioner seeking to remove Peggy Wright said it’s because the NDP member isn’t accessible to constituents and was critical of the government’s move to ban books with sexually explicit content from school libraries.
“In the applicant’s opinion, any lawmaker who distorts such matters or facilitates the exposure of children to sexualized material is unfit for public office and subject to immediate recall,” James Boyd said in his application.
Wright, in her response statement, cited her past career as a teacher and said she knows what’s needed to make the public education system better.
“I look forward to continuing to represent constituents on issues of affordability, health care, education and services that matter most to them,” she said.
Petitioners have three months to collect signatures equal to 60 per cent of the total number of votes cast in their constituency in the 2023 provincial election.
If successful, a constituency-wide vote would be held on whether the politician keeps their seat. If the member loses, a byelection would be held.