Alberta's rump of separatists suffered a major setback last week, when a judge overturned the Chief Electoral Officer of Alberta (CEO-A) decision that set the signature gathering process for the "Stay Free Alberta" petition. If you're interested, the full ruling is here (warning: it's lengthy, and full of legal technical language).
I'm not going to spend a pile of time here dissecting the ruling - while I understand most of what's written in it (I think), a deep dive would be tedious and relatively uninteresting. At the end of it all, the ruling has the net effect of rendering the entire signature gathering process that has gone on since January this year to be a legal fiction which "never happened".
How does that work? Central to the judge's ruling is the declaration that the decision of the CEO-A to grant the petition was "unreasonable", and that the crown had failed to execute any kind of consultation with affected First Nations, therefore the decision itself was quashed. In doing so, the judge effectively turned the next 4 months of signature gathering into a legal ghost - the paper exists, but the authorization to gather those signatures doesn't and therefore the signatures themselves cannot be considered.
This is unlikely to be the last we hear of this nonsense though.
