On Monday, Court of Appeal Justice Alice Woolley ruled that Elections Alberta can begin the process of verifying the signatures from Stay Free Alberta’s referendum petition and can publicly report the results. This partially overrules the ruling from Court of King’s Bench Justice Shaina Leonard that quashed the petition in May.

Elections Alberta will now formally count and check the validity of signatures gathered by volunteers last winter asking for the question: “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?” to be put on the ballot for a referendum.

The first step of validating signatures will be to check them against the electors list to ensure the signatories exist and are valid electors within the province. Then, a random selection of signatories will be contacted by Elections Alberta and asked if they signed.

This is how it can be determined if any signatures were falsely inserted into the petition through improper use of the electors list. If large numbers of people contacted assert, they never signed, Elections Alberta will investigate further. 

As well, if there is an inordinate number of duplicate signatures, it will trigger further investigation. Electors’ lists are also salted with false names and if any of them are found in the petition, alarm bells will be set off. That is how it was determined that the Centurion Project had allegedly been using lists.

Some signatures on the petition will be rejected for other reasons such as a lack of physical address provided, or illegible writing or if the voter appears ineligible for other reasons such as age or location.

Elections Alberta won’t scrutinize every signature, but they will check thousands to ensure a good sampling and then reduce the estimated count based on the error rate. In the case of the Forever Canadian petition for example, they submitted 438,568 signatures but Elections Alberta reduced it to 404,293.

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Stay Free Alberta was bound by more stringent requirements in petitioning in having to ask for identification from every signatory making it unlikely that a large amount of the sampling will be determined invalid. Stay Free Alberta submitted over 300,000 signatures, and the requirement to trigger a referendum is 177,000. The petition should comfortably surpass the bar even after scrutiny from Elections Alberta.

This should clear up any allegations that the electors list had been used in the petitioning process. While the investigation continues with the Centurion Project and the Alberta Republican Party, there was never any evidence that Stay Free Alberta had access to or used the lists.

NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi repeatedly claimed the petition should be tossed out due to the actions of the Centurion Project. He stated, “To me, the entire petition is invalid.” His claims will be invalidated as the petition is validated.

All that said, if Elections Alberta does find evidence that the electors list was somehow used in the petitioning process, it will lead to a wide investigation and a massive controversy.

What the official counting and verification of the petitioning won’t do is change which referendum questions will be held on October 19.

Justice Woolley made it clear in her ruling that she was only allowing the counting to continue, but that the process will go no further until the full appeal process on the Leonard ruling is completed. The Stay Free Alberta question will not be appearing on the ballot this fall if the signatures are verified, nor will any current questions be removed if they aren’t.

The verification and counting of the signatures presented by Stay Free Alberta will strengthen the case for holding a referendum on independence, even indirectly with the non-binding question being presented on October 19. It will prove that hundreds of thousands of Albertans wanted the question asked, and assuming verification, it will quell allegations the signatures were fraudulently acquired.

If there is a majority vote for option 2 in the upcoming referendum, it will be much harder for the premier to resist working toward presenting a formal and binding referendum on the question posed by Stay Free Alberta.

Until the appeals process is completed, the ruling by Woolley gives Stay Free Alberta an important victory, but only a moral one.