Well it IS direct democracy in action. IF they can collect signatures equal to 60% of the votes in the last election and IF they can get more than 50% of votes for a new candidate in another election, the people will have spoken.
Personally I think its a lot of sabre rattling but the unions, and it’ll fizzle out in a few weeks, but we’ll see.
The recall petitions aren’t being driven by the unions.
I think its a bit naive to think this is SOLELY a grassroots thing. The NDP and the unions (AFL) are definitely hoping to inflict as much damage as they can to the UCP. They’re not likely to put their name on the recall but they will definitely be doing anything they can behind the scenes to give it momentum.
I think its a bit naive to think this is SOLELY a grassroots thing.
It is solely a grassroots thing. There would be a lot more than two petitions gathering signatures right now if it wasn’t.
So how do you logically explain Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan last week advocating for recalls to “topple this government” as payback for the government’s use of the Charter’s notwithstanding clause to end a province wide teachers strike and then the first petition out of the gate was for the Education Minister’s job? Those two things are totally unrelated?
Advocating for a recall isn’t the same thing as initiating one. The Education Minister was a logical first choice.
https://www.elections.ab.ca/recall-initiative/recall/Current-Recall-Petitions/
The person who initiated the first recall, Jennifer Yeremiy, is a former educator from the University of Alberta and currently a podcaster. Bit of an odd choice for the AFL to recruit considering she’s not even part of any union.
So an ex member of a union? Not exactly odd. I take your point that the union didnt *initiate *the recall. They cant, it has to be citizen. But they are obviously fully in support and any time the AFL boss says yes lets bring down this government and wages are on the line in future negotiations, union members are going to listen.
The truly odd part is that when the union’s bedmates, the NDP, were in power, teachers got no increase in pay at all, except for the one that had already been passed by the previous conservative government. So Im not sure exactly sure where the unions get the idea that if someone else were in power, they’d be in a better position.
Actually I just rechecked her LinkedIn and she was never was a professor at the U of A, though she was educated there. (She did run for MP, though, so there’s that).
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/jenny-yeremiy-p-geoph
So no association with the AFL at all.
https://operationtotalrecall.ca/
(As started by This guy, so again not the AFL.)
You’d think everything would have paperwork submitted at this point if it was organized by the AFL. Instead it’s mostly just private Facebook groups. A lot don’t even groups organized against it.
It’s not like the AFL has to be “behind the scenes” on this anyway. The requirements behind recall are practically nonexistent.
I don’t get it. The whole point of recall legislation is so that if the government goes off the rails, people can recall/topple them mid-way through an election cycle. I really don’t see how the ‘good faith’ approach to that sort of legislative option would go otherwise.
I really hope the labour unions do it.
Ah, but the far-right came up with the idea before they came into power, when they could maintain the fantasy it would never be used against them.
good faith
That’s rich coming from an administration that bypasses the Charter when their negotiations with the ATA don’t go the way they wanted. That’s the definition of bad faith.
The UCP never intended the legislation to be used against them, it was for them to use against left wing city councils. Remember the attempted mayor recall by now UCP backed city councillor (Lagdon Johnston) in Calgary? The UCP only governs in bad faith, this statement is just more gaslighting, if we could somehow utilize the gas from UCP gaslighting, we’d double Canada’s energy production overnight.
Ah yes, now they have power and are finding out why powerful people don’t like democracy.
The nice thing about the UCP is it’s provincial, and so they don’t have the ability to just start ignoring the rules when they overstay their welcome. I guess if they managed to separate, they could go full Mussolini, but basically lol right.
