Former Elections Alberta staff raise integrity concerns about Water Not Coal petition verification

Five former Elections Alberta employees have raised "mismanagement" concerns about how the agency verified signatures on Corb Lund's Water Not Coal petition, which sought to ban new coal mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

In an Aug. 6 letter to the Alberta legislature's Standing Committee on Legislative Offices, the former staff — including the service centre manager and four supervisors — alleged that procedures changed, training materials were withheld from supervisors before staff training, and oversight was inadequate. "We are now reaching out to you about our concerns of the integrity of the petition review process, specifically the lack of oversight, inconsistent processes and procedures that put into question the integrity of the final Water Not Coal petition validation results," the letter stated.

The petition was submitted with more than 196,000 signatures. Elections Alberta verified 172,088 signatures using a random sampling method, falling short of the 177,732 signatures required. Lund has sought judicial review of the petition's rejection, filing in the Court of King's Bench in July. According to Lund, lawyers acting as scrutineers for the campaign during the count raised concerns about procedural fairness and reasonableness of decisions.

Former staff said they resigned during the verification process due to difficult working conditions. Two long-term directors were terminated without cause, including the person responsible for overseeing petition processing. "There was no communication, there was no trust and it no longer was a safe environment," the employees wrote. "We did not feel respected and felt we were being treated unprofessionally. We had concerns whether the process was being completed in a fair, equitable and consistent manner with the many daily and sometimes hourly changes to the processes."

Former staffers had developed templates for previous petitions, including MLA recalls and a citizen initiative petition about public funding of private schools. Templates were initially deemed acceptable but were changed after the Water Not Coal petition was submitted for verification. Elections Alberta has not responded to the allegations.