A petition aimed at ousting Calgary’s mayor has officially fallen short, and was deemed insufficient following the verification process.
The results were presented to city councillors and Mayor Jyoti Gondek at a special meeting of council Monday morning.
City clerk Kate Martin said the petition garnered 69,344 unverified signatures, or 5.39 per cent of the city’s population.
The threshold to recall Gondek, according to provincial legislation, was 514,284 signatures from Calgarians who are eligible to vote, or 40 per cent of the city’s population.
“We have a lot of work to do as a council, we have really important decisions to make on behalf of Calgarians and I’m glad we don’t have this distraction anymore,” Gondek told reporters following the meeting.
The development came as no surprise as Landon Johnston, the man who launched the recall petition, said he didn’t meet the threshold to recall Gondek when he handed in the signatures last month.
Martin noted there were issues with the signatures in a random sample size collected, including blank addresses, insufficient affidavits, missing notice of petition and missing signatures.
“The chief administrative officer, and myself as his delegate, must exclude the name of a person whose signature appears on any name or form that does not contain the notice of the recall petition,” Martin said.
David Duckworth, the city’s chief administrative officer, said he asked for the signatures to go through the verification process even though that was not required in the legislation.
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“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,” he told city council. “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 to the legislation guiding the recall petition process.”
Although there are continued costs related to the recall petition moving forward, to date the city said the recall process has cost $30,500.
“The provincial government needs to think about what it just cost us to verify that none of those signatures are valid,” Gondek said.
The City of Calgary received notice of a recall petition targeting Gondek at the end of January, which was made public on Feb. 5 after it was verified and found to be in compliance with the recall criteria laid out in the Municipal Government Act.
Johnston had 60 days to collect the signatures, which were handed in to Elections Calgary on April 4.
That kickstarted a 45-day process to count the signatures.
According to Martin, the petitioner has two days to destroy copies of the recall petition and the city has until June 24 to destroy the information in the petition.
More to come…
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