CALGARY — Corb Lund’s citizen initiative petition seeking to ban new coal mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains has failed to meet the threshold required to force a province-wide referendum.
Elections Alberta Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure announced Friday that the “No New Coal Mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains” petition was unsuccessful after the agency completed its verification process.
The country singer’s petition required 177,732 verified signatures — equivalent to 10% of the 1,777,315 ballots cast in Alberta’s 2023 provincial election — to proceed.
Elections Alberta counted 196,088 valid signatures during the initial validation process, but found in a subsequent statistical verification conducted at a 95% confidence level that this reduced the estimated number of verified signatures to 172,088, leaving the petition 5,644 signatures short of the required threshold.
The verified signatures represented an estimated 5.8% of Alberta’s 2.97 million registered electors.
According to an official release, the primary reasons signatures were rejected during the validation stage included incomplete voter information, invalid dates, duplicate signatures and incomplete or improperly completed canvasser witnessing declarations.
During the verification phase, signatures were most often rejected because electors could not be reached, declined to verify their information or had provided invalid contact information.
Elections Alberta said no seeded names were found on the petition.
The agency introduced the use of seeded names on May 1 as an additional safeguard against potential irregularities.
Under the process, names from the Republican Party of Alberta’s List of Electors were added to the verification system to help identify potential fraud or improper signature collection.
Lund’s petition was launched through the Water Not Coal campaign, which sought legislation prohibiting any new coal mining activity in the Eastern Slopes of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains.
Elections Alberta approved the application and issued the notice of initiative petition on February 10.
Signature collection ended on June 10, with verification beginning the following day.
The verification process concluded July 2, meeting the timelines set out under Alberta’s Citizen Initiative Act.
In June, controversy surrounded the petition after Premier Danielle Smith said the initiative’s question would not appear on the Oct. 19 referendum ballot, citing a June 1 submission deadline established by Elections Alberta.
At the time, Lund said he was “deeply disappointed and shocked,” adding he had spoken with Smith in her office on May 11 to discuss the wording of the proposed referendum question and how it would appear on the ballot and that “at no point was any June 1 deadline mentioned.”
Lund’s petition was the first citizen initiative to undergo scrutiny under new provisions introduced through Bill 23, the Justice Statutes Amendment Act, 2026, which added the use of scrutineers during the verification process.
Under the legislation, petition organizers must return all petition materials and canvasser identification documents to Elections Alberta by July 6 and provide an affidavit confirming all copies of signature sheets have been destroyed.
Financial reports related to the campaign must be filed by August 10.
