The UCP’s Referendum Is Heading to a Disastrous Outcome

Whatever happens on Oct. 19, the United Conservative Party of Premier Danielle Smith will have left Alberta a worse place than it was before the 10 referendums scheduled to be voted on that day.

After the ballots have been counted, Alberta will be angrier, more divided, more radicalized and, not incidentally, a worse place to invest money than it was before.

A “yes” vote in the separation referendum will set the stage for another, supposedly legally binding separation vote — in 2027, before a provincial election, according to the premier. So the anger, division and uncertainty will continue and intensify if that happens.

But since no one can be confident that a “no” vote won’t be followed by the separatist-dominated UCP imposing another separation referendum anyway, the anger, division and uncertainty is also likely to continue no matter what transpires.

Regardless of which side actually wins the separation referendum, the other side will distrust the process that led to it and furiously doubt the result — and not without sound reasons.

At the heart of this still unfolding disaster wrought by Smith and her political advisors, is Elections Alberta, the agency that oversees Alberta elections, byelections and referendums. The supposedly “independent, non-partisan office of the Legislative Assembly” is in a state of near-collapse, barely capable of overseeing a normal election let alone Smith’s chaotic experiment in stage-managed, sham “citizen initiative” referendums.

Elections Alberta is underfunded, understaffed and having difficulty finding sufficient election day employees. It is internally divided and beset by rapid legislative and regulatory flip-flops enacted by the UCP government seemingly to enable the separation campaign or keep the secession pot boiling as a negotiation tactic with Ottawa. It is further burdened by the UCP’s MAGA-influenced policy that all 10 wordy and complicated ballots must be counted by hand within 48 hours.

As a result, the agency can no longer be trusted by citizens, regardless of their views on separation, to be able to run the vote in ways that electors can feel confident is fair and neutral.

In a column published Thursday, Postmedia political columnist Don Braid labelled Elections Alberta “the agency that can’t count straight.” Now it’s about to be “swamped with millions of referendum votes,” he observed, in what may turn out to be the biggest election turnout in Alberta history.

“The government has a right to pose a question, but none whatever to claim this is ‘direct democracy,’” Braid wrote in that column. “The result is a vast UCP opinion poll that will cost taxpayers up to $130 million.”

The same day, Edmonton-based author and national security scholar Patrick Lennox published a Substack column stating bluntly that 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.”

Lennox — author of Alberta Separatism: Foreign Interference, and Canada’s Survival in a Revolutionary Age, which is scheduled to be released next week — makes a convincing case, cataloguing the series of “head-scratching snafus” that illustrate the disordered state of Elections Alberta as the referendums, now less than a month away, nears.

• Changes in Citizen Initiative laws to make it easier for a separatist referendum petition to be approved, followed by more changes to make it harder for anyone else to get a petition approved.
• Changes to the law by the UCP to get around a court ruling that declared the wording of a separatist group’s petition to be unconstitutional.
• Special-ballot packages sent to voters with out-of-date information threatening $50,000 fines and two years in prison for citizens who use the ballots in accordance with current law. Whoops, just scratch that part out, says Elections Alberta. Many will not take the chance and won’t vote.
• The largest data breach in Canadian history, the notorious leak of a voters list containing the personal information of all 2.9 million Alberta registered voters.
• Defiant separatist groups that refuse to hand over financial records to the agency as required by law, and will likely get away with it.
• Allegations from within the agency that suggest government intervention kept Corb Lund’s Water Not Coal petition from being approved.
• Resignations and firings of long-time Elections Alberta employees, some of them attacking the validity of the petition-validation process.

More recently, there has been that bizarre cabinet order that lists of electors must now list no electors, presumably to make it impossible for election scrutineers to do their jobs.

Plus, of course, there is the $4 million poured by the UCP into a taxpayer-funded advertising campaign to get voters to support the “noxious nine” referendums designed to incite division and subvert Confederation.

“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,” Lennox wrote, citing the agency’s own admission in its previous annual report that it lacked the resources to conduct the complicated balloting properly.

As Alberta journalist Jodi MacPherson summarized the state of affairs at Elections Alberta succinctly on her Substack: “Alberta’s October referendum is an absolute train wreck, a dumpster fire, a dog’s breakfast, a political juggernaut, a recipe for disaster — choose your favourite expression. It’s bad.”

MacPherson wrote that on Sept. 3. Nothing has gotten any better since.

This mess leaves Alberta’s separatist minority with no confidence. Steeped in MAGA paranoia and conspiracy theories as their movement is, Smith’s obvious effort to play both ends against the middle so that she can emerge as the winner no matter what happens leaves them convinced that despite the evidence the system is stacked against them.

There’s no comfort for the rest of us either. The UCP has had its thumb on the scale to benefit the separatist campaign since the beginning of this saga. It would be naive to assume that they’ll start to behave themselves now.

Together, this clearly adds up to a sound reason to postpone or scrap this referendum.

Lennox called on Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure to take the bull by the horns. “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,” he concluded.

The UCP, obviously, will allow no such thing.

Albertans and Canadians are going to have to live with this disaster for a long time after Oct. 19.