EDMONTON — Elections Alberta announced on Friday that the recall petitions against Associate Minister Muhammad Yaseen and Minister Rajan Sawhney both failed to reach 20% of the signatures needed to trigger a by-election, leaving AB Resistances' plan to dethrone the UCP via recalls in doubt. On Feb. 2, the Western Standard published an article detailing political TPA, ABR's plot, two-years in the making, to dethrone the UCP and Danielle Smith by weaponizing the Recall Act.Going back to 2024, the plan was to select six UCP MLAs whom ABR could target via recall to remove from government and cause the UCP to lose control of the Alberta government. "The one and only option open to Albertans that effected real change was Bill 52, the Recall Act," reads a December 2024 blog post written by ABR’s founder, Marg Tokar. .They quickly selected Yaseen (Calgary–North), Sawhney (Calgary–North West), Mickey Amery (Calgary–Cross), Demetrios Nicolaides (Calgary-Bow), Nathan Neudorf (Lethbridge–East), and Peter Singh (Calgary–East) as their targets because those six won their ridings by a combined 2,080 votes in the 2023 election. Yaseen and Sawhney were the two MLAs most susceptible to the petitions, given that they won their ridings by 129 and 143 votes, respectively. The 90-day signature collection period for the petitions against Yaseen and Sawhney, in which the campaigns needed to secure a total number of signatures that equaled 60% of the total number of votes cast in the riding during the 2023 election, ended on Feb. 22. On Friday, Elections Alberta announced that the petition against Yaseen, which needed 9,503 signatures to be successful, had managed to gather just 638, 6.7% of the number required. They also announced that the campaign against Sawhney, which needed 24,822 signatures, only collected 3,399, which is 23% of the total required. ABR, which in 2023 stated that its goal was "the end of the UCP," missed their top two targets and three of their top four, after the petition against Nicolaides gathered only 41% of the signatures needed to succeed. .The UCP currently control the legislature by four seats, following the departure of two MLAs from their caucus; however, ABR has just three of their original six targets remaining. Hopes to topple the UCP have gotten slimmer for ABR, as they have already counted the campaign against Neudorf as a loss, believing someone intentionally filed an application against him to block ABR from doing so. They appeared to have added another target, Adriana LaGrange, in August 2025, following an eventful spring session that saw her at the heart of Alberta's AHS scandal, however, won her seat in 2023 with 57.5% of the vote, which leaves them with a large deficit to overturn if they hope to reach the required number of signatures. Outside of the bottom six UCP MLAs, in terms of margin of victory in the 2023 election, the next closest MLAs are Dale Nally, who won his seat by 1,744, and Nate Glubish, who won 2,219. Elections Alberta announced on Friday, however, that the recall petition against Nally had fallen short of the required number of signatures, gathering 2,622, which is 16.7% of the total needed. .The campaign against Singh will be the next of ABR's targeted petitions to be submitted, as its 90-day window to gather 14,322 signatures will end on March 2. The campaign against LaGrange is scheduled to end on March 5, when its window to collect 18,624 signatures expires. ABR's final targetted campaign will have until March 17 to collect 15,138 signatures to recall Mickey Amery.Additional campaigns that Elections Alberta announced as unsuccessful on Friday included those against Nolan Dyck, Ric McIver, Myles McDougall, and RJ Sigurdson. The campaigns against Jockie Lovely and Searle Turton were also withdrawn. Friday's announcement brings the total number of unsuccessful petitions to 11, with 15 still active.
