Calgarians will likely never officially know the details of who contributed to, or how much money was exactly spent on the petition to recall any associated political campaigns against Mayor Jyoti Gondek.

Petition founder Landon Johnston, speaking to the media after a meeting with Mayor Gondek during the afternoon of March 22, said that he too was concerned with the lack of rules around municipal recall petitions.

“My biggest issue has been transparency, my biggest issue has been with accountability,” Johnston said.

“This is one piece of legislation that we could hold our officials accountable, and every other legislation that they give us. You guys know that freedom of information act when you guys get emails, and they’re 99 per cent redacted about something that you know they were doing nefariously wrong, but they’re allowed to redact it themselves.”

He said that although he wanted to be a part of the change for more accountability, he was not prepared to release any names of donors, nor the names of signatories on the recall petition.

“I’m not going to show you guys the names, but I’ll show you the amounts that have been coming in. That’s not a secret.”

He said that people have made anonymous donations to the recall petition campaign and that there wasn’t any legislation that required those individuals to be disclosed.

“I’ve been doing this by the rules, and the rules are there are no rules for financing,” said Johnston.

“I don’t have to.”

He said that despite that lack of requirement under the Municipal Government Act (MGA), he has been restricting any donations to his side of the recall petition campaign to small donations—despite the existence of other groups working to also collect signatures for his petition.

“I could have accepted $500,000 in donations as a gift from a grandfather for a gift from an uncle—people have offered me a bunch of money, and I’ve denied it because I don’t want to be responsible for that much money,” Johnston said.

Johnston responded to a question as to whether he would voluntarily consider releasing donors, amounts, and expenses in line with what some political candidates and third-party advertisers do during an election.

“I wouldn’t be happy reporting who donated it,” he said.

Still, he said, the rules should be changed, and has asked the Minister of Municipal Affairs for a meeting on the issue. He said it’s a major problem with the legislation, something he said to Minister McIver in an email.

“He has every opportunity, but he emailed me and said, ‘Sorry, Landon, I do not want to make it easier to get rid of an elected official because they were voted in democratically.’ This is democratic. This is the power to the people. This is the one piece of legislation given to us to fight back against bad leadership,” Johnston.

Regulations requiring disclosures not enacted, despite provisions in MGA

In response to questions posed to the City of Calgary regarding disclosure rules for municipal recall petitions submitted to Elections Calgary, the city said that they were not aware of regulations made to require the disclosure of petition information.

“The Municipal Government Act (MGA) does not set out disclosure requirements with respect to municipal recall petitions. To our knowledge, regulations have not been made with respect to recall petitions at the municipal level,” said a spokesperson for the City of Calgary.

The Ministry of Municipal Affairs confirmed it.

“There are no fundraising or financial disclosure regulations associated with any of the petitioning processes in the Municipal Government Act, including petitions for recall, petitions for council to consider a municipal bylaw, petitions for inspections, and petitions for dissolution,” the statement read.

Under the MGA, cabinet can make provisions under the Local Authorities Election Act, that covers recall petitions made for provincial MLAs, also applicable to municipal recall petitions.

Those provisions could include the requirement to disclose donations made towards a municipal recall campaign as they are required at the provincial level.

Premier Danielle Smith said that when the recall petition legislation was passed, there was an aspirational goal of giving citizens the ability to cast judgment on the performance of their elected officials.

Disclosure requirements, however, will not be coming before April 4, she said.

“There is a rule where you can’t start a petition campaign sooner than 18 months into a mandate, and you can’t six months before the next election. But as we’re watching it be enacted in a number of different municipalities, the minister is looking at ways in which we can build a little more rigor around the process, a few more rules around it,” she said.

“We don’t want to make any changes while there are active recall campaigns going on. But when you use piece of legislation, you sometimes identify some of the issues associated with that. So [Minister of Municipal Affairs Ric McIver] has already embarked on looking at ways in which he might modify it, but we’ll wait until these process processes play themselves out before we propose any additional changes.”

Mayor Gondek, in response to the Premier’s comments, said that it was unclear how the government could make changes to regulations in the middle of the recall petition campaign.

“I respect the fact that the government saying we’re looking at making it better, but we can’t do it right now, because we’re in the middle of a petition,” she said.

“I don’t disagree that there’s nothing that can be done while we are in the midst of this.”

She said that if Johnston was interested in doing so, she would be prepared to send a joint statement with him on the topic of the recall legislation to Minister McIver.

“If that’s something that he would like to engage in, then it’s quite likely that I will be chatting with him again,” Mayor Gondek said.

“I don’t know what that looks like. Again, you know he’s probably had a very overwhelming day. I think he had to do a scrum with all of you, and it’s not always easy. I respect the fact that he’s trying to do something that while it may be targeted against me, at least he’s engaging in a process that he has every democratic right to engage in.”