The randomized sample of the recall Mayor Jyoti Gondek petition showed that none of those signatures collected met the provincially set verification rules.

During a Special Meeting of Council Monday, Calgary city councillors were presented a report from City Clerk Kate Martin, who was the administrator of the recall petition.

Calgarian Landon Johnston submitted the recall petition amid much fanfare in early April, in several boxes delivered to the Elections Calgary office. It was the culmination of several weeks work to gather the signatures, one that covered dozens of communities in Calgary.

During the presentation, Martin said that their count of the signatures was 69,344, or roughly 5.39 per cent of the total number of signatures required to force the recall of Mayor Gondek.  They needed 40 per cent, or 514,284, signatures in order to force the recall.

“I, Katarzyna Martin, the City Clerk for the City of Calgary, hereby declare the recall petition to recall Mayor Jyoti Gondek, received on April 4, 2024 to be insufficient,” Martin told councillors. She then delivered the declaration to the acting clerk of the meeting.

Calgary’s Chief Administrative Officer, David Duckworth, said that although not required by the legislation, he’d asked for the signatures to go through the verification process.

“I believed that it was important to provide additional transparency to the public and parties involved in the process about the recall petition that was submitted,” Duckworth said.

“And secondly, it was a learning opportunity. I wanted to test the parameters of the municipal government act and share our learnings with the Minister of Municipal Affairs who is accountable for the legislation guiding the recall petition process.”

Verification yielded zero valid signatures

Following the letter of the law around verification, of the 369 signatures that were included in the randomized sample (read here to find out more about that process), none were found compliant with the rules.

“Therefore 100 per cent of the signatures were invalid and the total number of verified signatures is zero. Again, this is because the notice of the recall petition was not included on any petition pages, as required by the Municipal Government Act,” Martin said.

The recall petition has cost the City of Calgary $30,500 to date. Martin said more costs would be incurred, including for offboarding of part-time staff, destruction of the petition, and in the case of any legal challenges.

Mayor Gondek said the entire process requires review by the provincial government. Questions were raised about making the process easier to navigate for the petitioners.

“I guess it is up to the to the provincial government to understand how to make this process a little bit more user friendly for folks,” the mayor said.

Cost was also a concern for the mayor, as it should be for the taxpayers, she said.

“I think when we have expended little over $30,000, to verify a process where the sample size tells us that every submission was missing information, that’s something that we need to reflect on as well,” she said.

“Again, the provincial government needs to think about what it just cost us to verify that none of those signatures are valid.”

Mayor Gondek said that one of the good things to come out of the proposed Bill 20 legislation was that the province would take over administration of the recall petition, thereby limiting the added cost to cities.

Questions stonewalled, petitioner Landon Johnston said

Johnston told LWC after the recall special meeting that he had a tough time getting answers to the very question he believes invalidated most of the signatures. He said the process itself was the hardest part.

The lack of compliance with verification rules included in the MGA does not mean Calgarians did not sign the petition. It just means the signatures didn’t meet the rules standards.

“Somewhere in March is when I found out that my form was missing, that all inquiries should be sent to the head petitioner, they said ‘well, it doesn’t matter. They’re not going to verify it anyways, and that I should have called the Municipal Affairs minister (Ric McIver), which I tried and he would not talk to me,” Johnston said.

“Anytime I had an issue or a question with exactly what they were saying invalidated my petition, nobody would answer me on it.”

Johnston also said that many of the dates he was out collecting signatures it was -10 or -20 Celsius, making it tough for some to write clearly on the signature sheets. Further, on the lack of address front, he said that many of the signatories were vulnerable Calgarians, he said told him they felt as though the Mayor wasn’t following through on helping people without homes. Those folks don’t have addresses, he said.

Still, Johnston said that while he wanted to remove Mayor Gondek from office, he also wanted to expose the flawed recall process. He said he knew immediately with the threshold of 514,000+ signatures that he would never make it.

“The whole purpose of this was first off to get rid of the mayor, But second, expose the process and I think we did a really good job of that,” he said.