First citizen recall petition against Alberta legislature member fails

EDMONTON – The first of more than two dozen recall petitions launched against members of Alberta’s legislature has come up short.

Jenny Yeremiy submitted to Elections Alberta Tuesday her petition against Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides — but said she needed thousands more signatures.

Carrying “Recall Nicolaides” signs and a banker’s box of petition sheets, she told reporters outside the Elections Alberta office in Edmonton that the campaign collected about 6,500 signatures, well short of the required 16,000.

She said she was still proud of the result as she felt the signature threshold was “pretty damn impossible.”

When asked why she was still submitting the petition despite coming up short, Yeremiy said it was to send a message.

“We want to put on the record that there are 6,500-plus of us that are angry with the way (Nicolaides) is abusing his rights,” she said. “(If that) doesn’t tell our education minister that his constituents have an issue with the way that he’s leading us, I don’t know what will.”

The petition was launched in October and, if successful, would have forced a constituency-wide vote on whether Nicolaides should lose his seat in the legislature.

A spokesperson for Elections Alberta said it would announce next steps once Yeremiy’s official deadline passes on Wednesday.

Yeremiy said even though it came up short, she thinks the petition was a “massive accomplishment” as it helped get people organized ahead of the next provincial election, set for October 2027.

“We are learning how to organize ourselves, how to govern ourselves locally,” she said. “We’re going to need to the way this government is going.”

The petition was the first of 26 launched against members of the legislature in the final months of 2025. Twenty-four are against members of Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative caucus, including the premier. The two others are against members of the Opposition NDP.

Many of the petitioners targeting Smith’s caucus have said they were motivated by the government using the Charter’s notwithstanding clause to halt a provincewide teachers strike at the end of October.

Yeremiy had criticized the move as well, although her petition against Nicolaides was launched days before the government ended the strike and forced on teachers a contract with terms they had previously rejected.

In her application to Elections Alberta, Yeremiy wrote that she wanted the petition over what she called the minister’s “clear failure to support public education.”

Nicolaides’ press secretary Garrett Koehler said the minister’s office will have more to say once Elections Alberta announces the official results but added that the result wasn’t surprising.

“The fact that only 6,500 signatures were collected — not even half the number required to trigger a recall — is clear proof that this campaign was meritless, as has been the minister’s position all along,” Koehler said in an email.

Nicolaides is currently in Tanzania, where earlier Tuesday he reached the top of Mount Kilimanjaro to raise funds to combat domestic violence. His sister was the victim of a murder-suicide at the hands of her ex-husband.

Yeremiy’s was the only recall campaign with a January deadline. Signatures for more than a dozen others are due next month.

Petitioners have three months to collect signatures equal to 60 per cent of the total number of votes cast in their constituency in the 2023 provincial election.

If successful, a constituency-wide vote would be held on whether the politician keeps their seat. If the member loses, a byelection would be held.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 20, 2026.