Mitch Sylvestre of the Alberta Prosperity Project was all smiles today. Stay Free Alberta, delivered the signature documentation to Elections Alberta headquarters in Edmonton on Monday afternoon, surrounded by a sea of supporters with Alberta flags. The signatures were gathered over a 120-day period and are to be verified by Elections Alberta within the next 21 days, though that process may be delayed on Monday, May 4, 2026. Photo by Shaughn Butts /Postmedia

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Embarrassed are ya, Mitch?

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Mitch Sylvestre, leader of the separatist Stay Free Alberta movement, is complaining that Alberta’s citizen initiative process isn’t transparent enough, that it is unfaithful to the original purpose of the province’s citizen initiative law.

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Sylvestre wants the provincial legislature to review the law and make sure it easily allows any citizen of Alberta to start a petition drive that enables him or her to get a provincewide referendum placed before voters.

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Sylvestre can’t take “yes” for an answer.

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Elections Alberta declared last week that Stay Free’s petition had received enough valid signatures to move to the next stage of the process once constitutional challenges of the question have been settled by the Alberta Court of Appeal.

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A little more than a year ago, the Alberta government had even lowered the signature threshold just so groups like Sylvestre’s would have an easier time being successful.

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So what’s his beef?

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My guess is, Sylvestre and his co-organizers are ashamed that their petition wasn’t more successful.

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After sorting through thousands of signatures and applying rigorous statistic sampling methods for determining how many were legitimate, Elections Alberta determined Stay Free Alberta had collected 222,597 signatures. That’s not nearly as many as the 301,000 the group claimed when they first delivered their petition in May, but it’s comfortably over the 177,732 needed to trigger a referendum.

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So, what’s the complaint? If the courts clear the petition, the province is going to have to deal with the separatists’ demands to put the matter to voters.

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The humiliation likely comes from the fact that Stay Free Alberta barely made it over the threshold for a successful petition, even after the province changed the initiative law to make it easier. And the organizers fell well short of the 500,000 to upwards of 750,000 signatures they boasted they would get last winter.

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They even fell behind — way behind — the 456,388 signatures collected by the pro-federalist Forever Canada petition earlier this year. Forever Canada had to abide by the older, much more stringent petition rules, rules the Stay Free Alberta campaign would have failed under.

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Under the old rules, Forever Canada had to collect signatures equivalent to 10 per cent of eligible voters (not just 10 per cent of Albertans who actually voted in the last election).

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If the old standard (293,976 signatures) applied, Stay Free Alberta would have fallen short by more than 70,000 signatures.

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No wonder Sylvestre is a little red-faced. Despite all the sound and fury his separatists have generated, their rage mounted to very little.