‘Too big to rig’: Alberta separation petition succeeds with 223K verified signatures

EDMONTON — A citizen-led petition seeking to force a vote on Alberta quitting Canada is officially successful.

Elections Alberta announced Friday it verified nearly 223,000 signatures out of almost 280,000 valid names counted. The petition needed almost 178,000 signatures to be successful.

Despite the result, the document is largely moot.

It was quashed in court in May, although the ruling is being appealed by those behind the petition campaign as well as by Premier Danielle Smith’s government.

Smith has cited the separatist petition and a competing pro-Canada petition that got a little more than 400,000 verified signatures as the reason why she has put a separation question on the province’s Oct. 19 referendum.

The question asks Albertans if they want to remain in Canada or hold a second, binding referendum on leaving the country.

The premier has said the court decision throwing out the separatist petition prevented her from holding a binding vote on the issue in the fall.

Jeff Rath, a lawyer for the group behind the petition, said he was thrilled to hear of its success.

“We knew from the outset that we had to be too big to rig,” he said.

Rath also said the verification puts more pressure on Smith to put his group’s binding question on the October ballot instead of the current wording to vote for another referendum.

The petition’s question: Do you agree that the province of Alberta should cease to be part of Canada to become an independent state?

Rath said Smith promised. “She said more than once if we got enough signatures, our question would be on the ballot.

“If she doesn’t put our question on the ballot, she will have proven herself to be a liar and she has to resign.”

A spokesperson for Justice Minister Mickey Amery said the government appreciated the confirmation that hundreds of thousands signed petitions about the separation debate.

“That’s why our government will continue with the current referendum question,” the spokesperson said.

Elections Alberta started verifying the signatures after a judge ruled last month that the names should still be counted in case the appeal is ultimately successful.

The judge said if the verification process was delayed any longer, it risked the integrity of the petition, as those who signed it could move away or even die.

A group of First Nations has challenged the petition as being unconstitutional. They argue they were not duly consulted given the impact separation would have on treaty rights and how holding a vote could damage the treaty relationship.

Elections Alberta said that the nearly 223,000 verified signatures amounted to 7.5 per cent of all electors in the province.

It said common reasons for rejecting signatures included incomplete addresses, improper signing procedures, and signees being unwilling to verify their information when contacted by elections officials.

The agency said “292 duplicate signatures were also rejected.”

It added that the petition didn’t include any fake names it was looking for — ones seeded in a leaked provincial voter list.

The massive voter information breach earlier this year involved a different separatist group and is being investigated by multiple agencies, including the RCMP.

Rath accused Elections Alberta of being politically biased for “disenfranchising” roughly 50,000 signatures it ruled as invalid.

“We succeeded in spite of them,” he said.

“We knew we needed to have way more signatures than we needed, because we knew Elections Alberta was going to pull every dirty trick in the book to try to disqualify us.”

Alberta’s petition laws have been the subject of serious political debate dating back to the spring of 2025, when Smith’s government drastically reduced the signature threshold needed for citizen-led referendum petitions shortly after Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals formed government.

If the signature threshold had not been lowered, the separatist petition would have come up short. The old threshold was about 294,000 names.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 24, 2026.

Jack Farrell and Lisa Johnson, The Canadian Press