Western Standard - May 13, 2026


Smith says Alberta will appeal independence petition ruling

Topics
appealing independence petition ruling
Mentioned
Mitch Sylvester Elections Alberta Leonel Leave
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Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

186.7

Word count

643

Sentence count

23


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Justice Leonel Leonel ruled that there needed to be consultation on the Forever Canada petition, and that the petition should be put to the ballot as a government question. Premier Rachel Notley says she will appeal the decision, and calls on the Prime Minister to call a referendum.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Will you put the referendum question to the ballot as a government question after the ruling today by Justice Leonel?
00:00:07.600 Well, although our government does support Alberta remaining in Canada,
00:00:11.820 we think that today's decision by the court will deny opportunity to well over 300,000 Albertans to have their petition verified by Elections Alberta.
00:00:21.240 We think that this decision is incorrect in law and anti-democratic, and we will be appealing it as a result.
00:00:29.200 Our cabinet and caucus will, of course, be meeting in the next couple of days to discuss the full context and make some decisions after we've had a chance to talk it through.
00:00:38.700 The fact that there are hundreds of thousands probably of Albertans who believe that should have been put to a question as well,
00:00:46.400 and the fact that the justice decided that there needed to be consultation, it's unclear what that means exactly in the future.
00:00:54.380 What does it say about the fact that independence movements or just the question of independence movements in Canada moving ahead?
00:01:04.080 Is Canada, I don't know, a prison that you can't get out of with any other means?
00:01:10.120 Well, you know, I guess we will have to talk with our Quebec counterparts to see what they think about this kind of ruling.
00:01:15.860 I would say that it is a single judge who's made a decision, and we have now 700,000 Albertans, whether they're on the Remain side or the Leave side, who've said that they want to have this public debate.
00:01:30.600 So our citizen initiative petition was always meant to be very permissive, and we kept on having to modify it to ensure that that permissive quality was in there.
00:01:42.320 we want to hear from Albertans. That's what we think democracy is. And we'll be meeting with our
00:01:46.660 caucus and cabinet to further review the decision and decide next steps. But as I say, since we
00:01:53.400 believe that this one is incorrect in law and anti-democratic, we will be appealing it.
00:01:57.920 I just spoke with Mitch Sylvester, the CEO of the Alberta Prosperity Project, and he told me that
00:02:02.680 he expected this court decision to come down the way that it did. And he also expects you
00:02:07.500 to call a referendum in response to it uh so you know i'm wondering what your message is
00:02:12.880 for the people who do expect you to call a referendum well as you as you know uh we make
00:02:18.760 our decisions in government through a process that includes committees uh through cabinet as
00:02:23.860 well as through caucus and so my caucus has just learned of this decision it just came down while
00:02:28.660 we were in the legislature and haven't had a time to get together and discuss what we what our next
00:02:33.740 steps will be. The committee has been meeting to look at the Forever Canada petition and to offer
00:02:39.640 some suggestions about what should be done with that one as well. But we haven't made a decision
00:02:44.060 yet. But I can tell you on this case in particular, this judgment, we think that there has been
00:02:49.320 an error in law, which is why we're going to be appealing it. And we think it's anti-democratic.
00:02:55.980 We want to make sure that the citizens who participate in good faith in this process
00:03:00.780 have an expectation that the elections Alberta is going to validate their signatures. That's
00:03:05.540 been stopped in this case, and that's part of the reason why we're going to appeal. But we'll have
00:03:09.080 more to say once I have had a chance to talk with cabinet and caucus. Is Mr. Sylvester mistaken in
00:03:14.980 his assumption that you will call the referendum? He's certainly one voice of many that I will no
00:03:20.200 doubt hear from over the next short while. But the decision makers on these kinds of issues are
00:03:25.680 our cabinet and caucus.