Alberta • Democracy

Elections act charges green party $20,000 unpopularity fee

The Alberta Green Party is challenging a piece of Alberta’s Election Act that penalizes candidates who do not receive many votes on election day.

Currently, provincial candidates who do not gain more than 50 per cent of the votes that the elected candidate receives must pay $250.

The money comes out of a $500 deposit that all candidates hand over when declaring their intention to run in a provincial election. Candidates who are elected or do well at the ballot box are refunded the full $500 when they complete their financial statements. 

The Green Party lost $20,000 in the last two elections as a result of this rule: none of their 79 candidates in 2008 and 59 candidates in 2004 broke the 50 per cent mark.

A similar rule at the federal level has already been struck down, and Green Party leader George Read is hopeful a letter to Attorney General Alison Redford will do the trick. If not, the party is prepared to take the issue to court. “This is an unfair barrier to the democratic process,” Read says.

Maybe $250 per candidate doesn’t sound like a big deal, but to small parties like the Greens, every dollar counts. The Green Party only had $10,000 in the bank the day the election was announced.

“This is the first step in our discussion of democracy in Alberta,” he says. 

The Green Party, like all opposition parties in Alberta, will pay close attention to the upcoming riding boundary commission hearings in hopes that it will correct the unbalanced urban-rural divide and other unfair riding divisions. 

But the commission isn’t expected to meet until at next year at the earliest, and in the past opposition parties have had a hard time influencing its findings. 

Prairies • Water

alberta River Activists Join with
Saskatchewan

Rivers do not respect political boundaries, nor does pollution.

With this in mind, the Keepers of the Water environmental advocacy group have joined like-minded activists in Saskatchewan to lobby the Alberta and Saskatchewan governments for better water management.

“Truly environmental groups disregard borders,” says Harvey Scott, a leading member of the Keepers of the Athabasca water advocacy group here in Alberta. He calls the new Saskatchewan contingent a natural extension of their growing organization.

Lake Athabasca and its tributaries extend across the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, and with the added strain of oilsands production on this water system, Saskatchewan First Nations and environmental groups have been engaged with their counterparts in Alberta for years now. 

Besides shared water knowledge and joint lobbying efforts, the multi-provincial group hopes to keep a more vigilant eye on decisions in Alberta that may affect the quality of water flowing into Saskatchewan. 

Despite a very welcoming attitude towards people living along these water systems, the Keepers are picky about whom they ally with. The Keepers of the Athabasca have specifically remained outside the Alberta provincial watershed councils, as the members felt the government was simply using the consultation process as a delaying tactic.