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Question about the AB petition to stay in Canada (lemmy.ca)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca to c/alberta@lemmy.ca

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It's my understanding that a referendum petition is about the phrasing of the question that's presented to go on the referendum ballot.

The pro-Canada group "won" the right to petition for their question to go on the ballot as they submitted before the anti-Canada traitors could. Basically, stay in Canada vs leave Canada.

Am I just an idiot, or is the safest thing for AB to do is not sign regardless of who is asking? If this petition gets enough sigs all it means is that this will be the question asked on the ballot for referendum instead of the leave question right? But if it fails, there won't be a referendum at all.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me this is being proposed as a petition to stay in Canada, but it's really a petition to trigger a referendum with "stay in Canada" as the question instead of "leave Canada".

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[–] Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Is that how it works? I'm under the impression any petition at this point is solely to get it put on the ballot. If no one signs, it doesn't go on the ballot, and there's no separation vote on the referendum ballot.

[–] Warehouse@piefed.ca 1 points 2 weeks ago

The Chief Electoral Officer would then review the signatures and determine if the petition has been successful. Successful legislative and policy initiatives would then be referred to a committee of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta for consideration. If the committee does not support a legislative initiative, a public vote would be held.

So it sounds like this passing doesn't necessarily lead to a referendum. Which, again, leads to the "heads I win tails you lose" scenario.

[–] GrindingGears@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 weeks ago

I'm not an expert here, so if I'm wrong on this and if someone is actually an expert, hopefully they could weigh in to correct my interpretation.

But my understanding of it is this:

I think it would be pretty much directly stated that if you got something like 70 or 80% of Albertans to sign onto this petition, like at that point the chief electoral officer could reliably question do we even need to have a referendum then? If the signatories were vetted and it could be proven they represented a huge percentage of the electorate, it states the obvious.

That will never realistically happen though. But what could (and will) happen is basically this turns into a challenge over who gets to raise the need of a referendum and the framing of the question. It was originally going to that sovereignty group, but now this Canada First group has mounted a court challenge to hopefully basically overcome them, and be the ones to control the framing of the question.