Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides is rallying UCP volunteers to fight against the bid to recall him, prompting the petition leader to warn Elections Alberta that the MLA’s counter-campaign might be overstepping the rules.
Jennifer Yeremiy, a Calgary scientist and parent, is leading efforts to recall her MLA Nicolaides by gathering at least 16,006 signatures of fellow residents of his Calgary-Bow constituency by a Jan. 21 deadline.
That’s the number of people who must sign a petition under the Recall Act to force a referendum-style “recall vote” on whether to keep or oust him as the riding’s MLA.
Nicolaides has cried foul, arguing that activists who oppose the UCP are using the recall process to protest government policy and topple MLAs like him, rather than targeting specific MLAs for individual misdeeds or ethical lapses that may warrant their dismissal.
He went further this week. Nicolaides emailed his riding’s UCP members, urging them to volunteer to help him counter the “politically motivated recall campaign” to unseat him.
“The process to defeat this recall requires a swift, organized and robust response, and we need to defend the mandate you gave,” Nicolaides wrote in
the email that circulated on social media, and which he later verified to CBC News.
His message to supporters asks for help with phoning constituents, data entry and “crucial signature verification.” Signatures on a recall petition will be verified by Elections Alberta officials, rather than by allies of the recall campaign’s subject.
Asked about this line Friday, Nicolaides said his team won’t be verifying signatures.
“I think that was a typo,” he said in an interview after speaking at a municipal conference. He doesn’t expect his volunteers to show up at petition sites, either.
Rather, he said his push will be advocacy and communications, in defence of the work he’s done.
“I think we can make sure volunteers are providing information about some of the positive things that have been achieved for the community,” Nicolaides said.
“Obviously in any kind of campaign there's always two sides to a story and I think it's important that they hear about those aspects as well.”
Yeremiy launched the campaign — the first against an MLA since the recall system launched in 2023 — in the middle of the province-wide teacher’s strike.
Her application cites the minister’s funding of private and charter schools and the state of the public education system as her main reasons for launching the petition.
In response to Nicolaides’s call for volunteers, Yeremiy announced Friday she sent a formal letter of concern to Elections Alberta. In it, she asked the agency if it believes Nicolaides's counter-campaign might exert “undue influence” on would-be petition supporters, or use volunteers that run afoul of the province’s Recall Act.
The law sets out strict rules about who can canvas for petition signatures (only residents of the target MLA’s riding) and how advertising campaigns supporting or opposing the petition can be funded and organized.
“The safety of our team and the integrity of this campaign depend on following the law and keeping the process free from interference," she said Friday in a news release.
After the Smith government forced an end to the teacher’s strike in late October, opponents of the UCP began efforts to
recall several other government MLAs.
Elections Alberta has approved one additional application since the push to recall Nicolaides began: one to unseat Airdrie-East MLA Angela Pitt.
She
went on the offensive against her riding’s petition leader in a public letter this week, saying the fact he’s a high school principal meant he was “using a taxpayer-funded position of authority” to advance his campaign, and wondered about its “potential inappropriateness.”
That constituent, Derek Keenan, had not publicized the fact he worked at a public school, because he wanted to avoid the political implications of that link.
Nicolaides, the education minister, said he wasn’t aware of his caucus colleague’s letter, but he defended the right of a principal or teacher to be involved in the recall process.
“Of course, everyone has the right to engage in political activities,” he said.
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