EDMONTON — The campaign to recall MLA Jason Stephan gathered just 29% of the petition signatures needed to trigger a by-election, while two more campaigns were disqualified after failing to hand in their petitions, according to an announcement from Elections Alberta on Monday.Staphan, Red Deer-South, faced a recall campaign by a group of his constituents who argued that he was unresponsive and failed to represent the interests of his riding's members. "He supports a separatist agenda, has disdain for French speakers, has failed to take his duties seriously by travelling against government advice and delaying his own swearing-in," reads a statement from the campaign organizer. The campaign to recall him needed to gather 14,508 signatures from Red Deer-South constituents to trigger an election, but they managed only 4,255. Stephan won his first term as MLA during the Alberta 2023 election after winning the Red Deer-South riding by 3,493 votes. .Elections Alberta also announced that the campaigns against MLA Nathan Neudorf, Lethbridge-East, and Glenn Van Dijken, Athabasca-Barrhead-Westlock, both failed to submit their petitions by their Feb. 23 deadlines and were subsequently disqualified.The campaign against Neudorf has been the subject of speculation for many months, as constituents and some anti-UCP advocates have claimed that a petition to recall Neudorf was submitted by a Lethbridge-East resident who only did so to block anyone else from doing so.With Monday's announcement, 14 of the 24 recall petitions filed against UCP MLAs in fall 2025 have now been declared unsuccessful, with the remaining 10 petitions yet to be submitted. There are also two active petitions against NDP MLAs.
