From the Editor: So, this is going well…

By Scott Schmidt on December 6, 2025.

sschmidt@medicinehatnews.com

After multiple sources suggested last week the UCP government was planning to either amend or repeal altogether its own Recall Act in response to a number of MLAs now facing petitions, Justice Minister Mickey Amery came out to deny it.

There won’t be changes made this session, he says, but the door has been left wide open for amendments down the line. After all, whenever she’s been asked about it, Premier Danielle Smith has made it clear she is not happy with the way the process is being used.

According to the Brooks-Medicine Hat MLA, recall petitions are “being weaponized by special interest groups.” Using the exact terminology, Amery and other UCP MLAs have echoed the premier over the past couple of weeks. They’ve even thrown in the “radical left” a few times for added effect.

It’s pretty clear the government is trying to paint the narrative that Albertans don’t actually want any UCP members recalled, and that a small organized minority working behind the scenes to “overthrow the government” is responsible. They claim they aren’t worried, that no one really wants this anyway, but they sure have a funny way of speaking about it.

Perhaps Smith’s plans will become more clear now that, according to its organizer, the premier will become the 18th member of her caucus facing a recall petition. Should 12,070 signatures be collected, the Act as it currently stands would mean a recall vote for Brooks-Medicine Hatters.

And for the record, petition organizer Heather VanSnick is not from any group – special, interested or otherwise – and when speaking with the News on Thursday she said, “I’m nobody. I’m just someone who isn’t happy with what’s happening. I just wanted to do something to help make a difference.”

Hardly wielding a weapon, she simply exercised an option made available to citizens by the current government. Obviously the UCP’s initial idea of a Recall Act was in response to the “accidental government” between 2015 and 2019, and an ultra confident Jason Kenney never dreamed Albertans would use it to oust conservative MLAs.

Of course, he also didn’t think his own party would turn on him before completing a single term, but predicting the future was not the man’s strong suit – Job Creation Act, Keystone pipeline buy, #bestsummerever… you get it.

Smith, apparently feeling equally astute, allowed her government to make the recall process significantly easier in July, about 3.5 months before tripling the all-time usage of the notwithstanding clause, forcing every disabled person to prove it and gifting more and more sweeping powers to questionably qualified ministers.

Never even mind the implementation of a two-tiered health system that absolutely won’t do what they’re promising or they’d drown Albertans in evidence of it.

Instead of Smith and her ilk just admitting their fall-session policies are extremely unpopular, they want the public to believe some all-powerful special interest group is behind a curtain controlling everything like we all live in Emerald City.

Why make up nonsense and insult Albertans’ intelligence with buzzwords if you truly have no intention to change the Act? Smith knows this isn’t Oz. She knows there is no string-pulling entity here. And she knows these recall petitions are a direct result of her own government’s recent actions.

There’s even an NDP member facing a recall petition now. Ms. Smith, is that citizen of Calgary-Beddington from a special interest group, too, or is this one done “in the spirit of the legislation?”

Albertans are using her policy to do the exact thing she said was needed in her so-called land of the Strong and Free. If the government cared about what Albertans are actually asking for, they could reverse any number of their unpopular, no-one-asked-for policies.

Instead, they’re quite clearly setting the public up for a reversal of the one piece of legislation people seem to be in favour of. And just so it’s clear, your author wrote in 2019 about recall legislation being dangerous because if it’s too easy, it will likely be attempted all the time and without sufficient reason.

Twenty-two per cent of the entire legislature is now facing a recall petition. So, yeah.

Elections are elections, and majorities are majorities, but this is a self-inflicted wound and they need to see it through. If the petitions lack traction, expect the government to leave it alone, but if there are signs of success, smart money has the UCP introducing a retroactive bill early in 2026 to kibosh the whole thing.

Smith doesn’t seem like the type to leave much for chance, and it’s tough to imagine she’d allow a recall vote where 50 per cent plus one basically ends her political career.

The province showed that scruple-less mindset just this week when they retroactively wrote the court system out of the Referendum Act because Thomas Lukaszuk and 456,000 Albertans are better at this than the Alberta Prosperity Project.

As it turns out, crafting a question about separating from Canada proves difficult when you have to take that pesky constitution into account. So the government fixed it.

Thanks to Thursday’s Bill 14, the minister, and the minister alone, decides which questions make it, and they even get to change the wording if they like.

Amery said it had nothing to do with the Alberta Prosperity Project’s separation question facing a court hearing, all while making the bill retroactive enough to save their question and allow reapplication at no cost.

To say this government can’t be taken at its word on this stuff is putting it so lightly it floats.

They’ve thumbed their nose this fall at everything from science and experts to the general public writ large.

Does anyone really believe they’ll behave any differently when their literal jobs are at stake?

Scott Schmidt is editor of the Medicine Hat News. Contact him at sschmidt@medicinehatnews.com

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