CALGARY — Premier Danielle Smith says she would like to continue working together with Corb Lund following the failure of the country singer’s citizen initiative petition to stop coal mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains.
Speaking at a joint press conference with Ontario Premier Doug Ford after her annual Stampede pancake breakfast in Calgary on Monday, Smith thanked all of the Albertans who participated in the citizen initiative process and said she had previously met with Lund to discuss his concerns surrounding coal development in Alberta.
“I've had a chance to meet with Mr. Lund and I told him that if this petition was not successful, let's work together on addressing some of the concerns that have been raised.”
On Friday, Elections Alberta’s Chief Electoral Officer, Gordon McClure, announced that Lund’s Water Not Coal campaign petition failed to meet the signature threshold required under the Citizen Initiative Act.
The petition needed roughly 178,000 verified signatures — equivalent to 10% of the ballots cast in Alberta’s last provincial election — to trigger a referendum.
While Elections Alberta originally validated 196,088 signatures, a subsequent statistical verification process reduced the estimated number of verified signatures to 172,088, leaving the campaign 5,644 signatures short of the requirement.
Smith said on Monday that her government has already taken significant steps to address many of the concerns raised by anti-coal activists such as Lund and the people who signed his petition.
“We’ve purchased leases and freehold for over 40,000 hectares in this target area in response to the fact that people want these landscapes to stay pristine,” Smith said, adding her government has also banned mountaintop removal and open-pit mining on future developments in the Eastern Slopes.
The premier also stated those restrictions were implemented to prevent potential selenium contamination issues that have affected mining projects in other jurisdictions.
She added that current policy requires mining projects to use the best available technology for water management and cited underground mining proposals as an example of how the industry is evolving, something that has also been emphasized by the Coal Association of Canada (CAC).
Rina Blacklaws previously told the Western Standard that modern coal mining employs significantly different practices than those that created legacy selenium challenges decades ago, including mitigating selenium generation through measures such as rock-storage optimization and water capture systems.
While defending her government’s actions, Smith did acknowledge that additional measures could still be considered regarding coal policy in Alberta.
“We know that this has been an issue for some time. We've responded to it through the various policies that we have,” Smith said.
“There may be more that we can do, but we'll continue to have that conversation.”
Meanwhile, Lund has criticized the outcome of the verification process and questioned the fairness of Elections Alberta’s procedure.
In an official statement released Friday, Corb Lund said he was “shocked” by the result but “not surprised,” citing what he described as continual government rule changes and roadblocks throughout the campaign.
“Of the more than 205,000 signatures delivered to Elections Alberta on June 10, 2026, roughly 35,000 were rejected,” Lund said.
“This has been an unreasonable and opaque process from the beginning, and despite diligently following every rule, we are left with more questions than answers.”
Lund said he has “grave concerns” about how the final number was calculated and the overall fairness of the verification process and, despite the setback, vowed the campaign would continue.
The singer added that he was currently on tour in the United States and would be speaking more in-depth on the topic later Monday to “outline Water Not Coal's next steps to prevent coal development in our headwaters.”