Edmonton Sun columnist Lorne Gunter wrote a piece calling the threshold to initiate a referendum in Alberta ridiculously low and dismissed concerns from advocates as whining. He makes the case that the bar was already lowered by the provincial government in 2025 and that citizens should be quietly satisfied with it.

When comparing the threshold for triggering a referendum in Alberta with other countries, though, Alberta’s bar is not low at all.

Before changes made by the Smith government, the bar was truly ridiculously high. Former premier Jason Kenney created citizen-initiated referendum legislation to keep a campaign promise. But he purposely set the timeline so short and the required signatures so high that the legislation was effectively useless. In reducing the bar to garnering 10% of the votes cast in the last election, the UCP brought the threshold into reality, and it still is higher than average.

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Among countries that regularly hold citizen-initiated referenda, Switzerland leads the pack. With a population of 9 million, only 100,000 signatures are required to initiate a constitutional referendum, and only 50,000 for a policy-based one. 

Under Alberta’s revised rules, over 177,000 signatures are required from a population of 5 million. The timelines are different as well. In Switzerland, citizens have 18 months to garner signatures to trigger a constitutional referendum. In Alberta, it had been a paltry 90 days, which was raised to 120 days in 2025, which is still a comparatively low timeline.

Despite the lowered thresholds for referenda, Switzerland isn’t overwhelmed by them. They put an average of 10 questions to the citizens per year. That’s more than other nations by a long shot, but in holding so many, they have an efficient process in place to conduct them. Citizens take the referendum process seriously too, thus won’t sign petitions for frivolous initiatives.

In Italy, only 1% of the population is required on a petition to hold a referendum to repeal a law, though they do limit signature gathering to 90 days. In New Zealand, 10% of the registered electors are needed to invoke a referendum, but advocates have 12 months to gather the signatures.

On top of it all, Alberta now has a $25,000 fee required to initiate a referendum. No other country asks such a high price of citizens to initiate a referendum.

The questions being asked by advocates such as Corb Lund and Mitch Sylvestre are based on the scrutiny applied to the process by Elections Alberta rather than the bar for signatures that had been set. The electoral authority’s impartiality has come into question of late over the selective application of rules for third-party advertisers.

The only people who see Alberta’s bar for citizen initiatives as being ridiculously low are people who don’t really want to see citizen-initiated referenda in the first place.