The first citizen recall petition against a member of Alberta’s legislature has failed. The campaign targeting Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides in Calgary-Bow collected about 6,500 signatures, and Elections Alberta’s official count confirmed 6,519 — well short of the 16,006 required to force a recall vote.
A banker’s box, and a message
Jenny Yeremiy submitted her petition to Elections Alberta on Tuesday, carrying “Recall Nicolaides” signs and a banker’s box of petition sheets to the agency’s Edmonton office. She told reporters the campaign had collected about 6,500 signatures, well short of the required 16,000, and that the signature threshold felt “pretty damn impossible.”
Asked why she submitted a petition she knew had fallen 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.”
In her application, Yeremiy said she launched the petition over what she called the minister’s “clear failure to support public education.” She said the campaign, though unsuccessful, was a “massive accomplishment” that helped organize people ahead of the next provincial election, set for October 2027. “We are learning how to organize ourselves, how to govern ourselves locally,” she said.
Elections Alberta confirmed the result the following day. Its verification counted 6,519 preliminary signatures, against a threshold of 16,006 — 60 per cent of the 26,676 votes cast in Calgary-Bow in the 2023 provincial election. Because the preliminary count was already far below the requirement, the full verification count did not proceed.
The minister’s response
Nicolaides’s press secretary, Garrett Koehler, said the minister’s office would have more to say once the official results were announced, but that the outcome was not 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 himself was out of the country as the petition closed: earlier Tuesday, he reached the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, on a climb raising funds to combat domestic violence. His sister was the victim of a murder-suicide at the hands of her ex-husband.
The first of 26
The Nicolaides petition, launched in October, was the first of 26 recall campaigns launched against Alberta MLAs in the final months of 2025. Twenty-four target members of Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative caucus — including Smith herself — and two target Opposition NDP members.
Many of the petitioners targeting the government say they were motivated by its use of the Charter’s notwithstanding clause to end a provincewide teachers’ strike at the end of October and impose a contract teachers had rejected. Yeremiy’s petition actually predated that move by several days.
Under Alberta’s Recall Act, petitioners have three months to gather signatures equal to 60 per cent of the votes cast in the constituency in the last provincial election — an intentionally high bar. A successful petition triggers a constituency-wide vote on whether the member keeps their seat, and losing that vote forces a byelection. Yeremiy’s was the only campaign with a January deadline; signature drives for more than a dozen others were due in February, and the early results suggested the same uphill math, with a second petition also falling short after hers.
