Former Alberta Progressive Conservative cabinet minister Thomas Lukaszuk is now trying to recast his Forever Canada petition as a simple request for MLAs to vote in the legislature.

But the record does not support that tidy new version. His own petition asked Albertans:

“Do you agree that Alberta should remain within Canada?”

That is not the wording of a routine policy motion. That is a provincewide ballot question, and it wasn’t filed as some symbolic open letter either.

Weird. Thomas Lukaszuk @LukaszukAB advocated publicly for a referendum. So why is he changing his mind now? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/KcnBuSjDh2

— NDP Lie Detector (@NDPLieDetector) May 11, 2026

Lukaszuk used Alberta’s formal citizen initiative process, the same mechanism used to trigger provincewide referendum action. His petition gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures and was accepted by Elections Alberta as a successful initiative petition.

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Elections Alberta says the petition collected 438,568 signatures, with more than 404,000 verified, far above the threshold required for action by the legislature. The petition was officially submitted to the Speaker in December 2025.

Lukaszuk also publicly described the effort as a referendum campaign in media interviews at the time. Now, after Alberta’s actual independence movement has surged far beyond what many establishment figures expected, he’s claiming the petition was really just meant to encourage MLAs to hold a vote.

But that explanation clashes with both the wording of the petition and the way it was promoted publicly.

You do not collect more than 400,000 signatures around a provincewide yes-or-no question on remaining in Canada and then pretend nobody was supposed to think “referendum.”

The paperwork, the process, and Lukaszuk’s own public comments all point in the same direction. He's triggered an independence referendum.