Good morning everyone.

Last fall, there was a segment of Alberta’s population that was steaming mad.

The United Conservative government was on its heels after it invoked the notwithstanding clause on its back-to-work legislation for striking teachers, raising the ire of unions and others who saw the move as trampling workers’ rights. And the government had used the same tool in the Canadian Constitution on a handful of bills affecting trans and gender-diverse youth not long before as well, shielding all of the new laws from court challenges.

Premier Danielle Smith’s government was also facing questions about health procurement contracts and its ties to private companies, both of which are being investigated by Alberta’s Auditor-General and the RCMP.

So citizens in multiple corners of Alberta decided to try and use the government’s own legislation against it by launching recall petitions against mostly UCP MLAs to try and oust them from the legislature.

But when the petition against Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides came up well short of the number of signatures required to challenge his seat by the January deadline, it seemed likely many of the other 26 petitions would also fail to get enough support.

Jenny Yeremiy, who launched the “Recall Nicolaides” effort last October, submitted just 6,500 signatures – well short of the required 16,000 to Elections Alberta.

And this week, the bid to remove Premier Danielle Smith from the provincial legislature also failed.

Heather VanSnick, the organizer behind the effort to oust the Premier from her Brooks-Medicine Hat constituency, said she collected about 2,300 signatures over the past three months – again, well short of the 12,070 needed in that riding.

Recall legislation requires petitioners to get signatures equivalent to 60 per cent of all votes cast in the most recent provincial election.

Smith thanked her constituents “for their continued support and trust throughout this process,” in a statement on Tuesday.

“It is an honour to serve this community,” she wrote.

Of the 26 recall efforts that were launched in the fall, 14 of them have either failed, not submitted their signatures or been withdrawn. Seven, including the Premier’s, await Elections Alberta to officially verify the number of signatures submitted, while five others will hit their deadline to submit signatures in the coming days.

Despite the lack of success, two new recall petitions were launched this week. One is for NDP MLA Marie Renaud in the St. Albert riding and needs 15,502 signatures by June 10. The other is for Airdrie-Cochrane MLA Peter Guthrie, leader of the Progressive Tory Party. Guthrie, a former cabinet minister under Smith, resigned from his position in February in protest of the Premier’s handling of the health care contracting and procurement controversy. He was later removed from caucus.

When former premier Jason Kenney introduced the recall legislation in 2021, it was touted as a way to keep politicians accountable in between elections. A form of direct democracy favoured by many in the UCP, including the current Premier.

But when the onslaught of petitions was launched against UCP MLAs and Smith herself, she argued that the recall process was being weaponized, and suggested unions were trying to overthrow her government. The UCP caucus said recall was meant to be used only in cases of “breaches of trust, serious misconduct, or a sustained failure to represent constituents, not political disagreements.”

While there was some rumbling at the time that the government would amend the legislation, it never happened.

The bar to remove a sitting Alberta MLA remains high, proven by the results of the over two dozen recall petitions launched since last fall.

This is the weekly Alberta newsletter written by Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.