By Sumayya
The voting (referendum) is finished, and a huge amount of support has shown that Alberta wants to stay a part of Canada. Now, there is an argument over who is to blame for the question even being on the ballot in the first place.
About 75 percent of the voters believed that Alberta should stay a Canadian province. The official results of the vote are expected to come out on Oct. 29.
Meanwhile, in the days following the Oct. 19 referendum, Premier Danielle Smith has blamed Thomas Lukaszuk and the Forever Canada movement for causing the question to exist. Lukaszuk told CTV News Calgary that her statement is wrong.
The Premier’s Position
The premier’s office states that she is sticking to the words she has already said in public about the issue. Her view was shared on CTV’s show, Power Play.
“Any citizen who starts a petition campaign in a legal process through Elections Alberta needs to take that seriously,” Smith said.
“And the Forever Canada folks, they began this process. They started a legal petition—a legal process—and got 400,000 signatures asking for a referendum on ‘remain,’ (and) there was another group of citizens—300,000 of them—asking for an Option 2, which was to start the process to leave.”
“We will take seriously when citizens go through that effort,” she said. “But if somebody has cold feet partway through, then they should be really questioning whether or not that’s the right pathway. For our part, we follow the law.”
Lukaszuk’s Take
The founder of Forever Canada has said for a long time that he did not want a referendum to happen because of his action. Lukaszuk, who is a former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister and deputy premier, says he checked the correct option out of the two choices given on his citizen’s initiative form.
The application form can be seen by the public, and CTV News Calgary has looked at it. The document shows that Lukaszuk checked the box for “legislative or policy proposal” instead of checking “constitutional referendum proposal.”
Lukaszuk says this situation is just the premier “hoping someone else will wear it.” By “it,” Lukaszuk means a very costly vote that ended up “delivering what we already knew—that the vast majority of Albertans are not separatists.”
“This is what a desperate premier looks like,” he stated.
The application form, which was handed in to Elections Alberta in early June 2025, also has a section called “description of proposal.”
It reads, in part: “since a referendum appears to be imminent anyway, it should be objective and not directed by special interest groups. Therefore, we as represented by the signatory and applicant below propose a referendum on the following question: Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”
Lukaszuk explains that the application was turned in during a time when the provincial government was altering the law.
“The day I filed that petition, the law clearly said that he who files a petition first blocks anybody else from filing a petition on a same or similar question for five years,” he said. “I wanted to block them from having a binding referendum on separation. In the body of the application, you only get to check off one box, and that’s what matters.”
According to Elections Alberta
Emails sent between Elections Alberta and CTV News Calgary in May 2026 state that the application was handed in as a policy proposal.
Elections Alberta also pointed out, “The proponent does not choose the type of citizen initiative petition; it is determined by the legislation.” CTV News Calgary was told that the proposal “did not seek to amend the Constitution or propose new legislation.” Therefore, Elections Alberta stated that a “policy proposal was the only available option.”
Elections Alberta added, “The proponent does not choose what happens in the event of a successful petition.” CTV News Calgary was told that in this situation, “the decision on how to proceed is the government’s.”
Question 10
Elections Alberta accepted the petition last year, and the government passed it to a committee. That committee met only this past May and sent it back to the cabinet and the premier’s office with a recommendation to hold a referendum.
It was added to the bottom of the other nine questions that had been announced months earlier. The text read:
“Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”
“Option 1: Alberta should remain a province of Canada.
Option 2: The Government of Alberta should commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada.”
Lukaszuk says that the final 10th question on the ballot was not his. He states that it was not the separatists’ question either.
“Those were the premier’s questions,” he said. “And frankly, she ignored the half-a-million Albertans that signed the petition and wanted this issue resolved in the legislature.”
