Hundreds of Albertans lined up in the cold in Stony Plain on Jan. 22, 2026, some waiting more than an hour, to sign Stay Free Alberta’s petition to force a referendum on the province leaving Canada. Organizers have until May to collect 178,000 signatures for the province’s chief electoral officer to validate.
An hour in the cold to sign
People in Stony Plain, west of Edmonton, were met by a long lineup when the doors at the community centre opened around lunchtime on Thursday, with some waiting more than an hour in bone-chilling temperatures to add their names.
Roger Cyr said he signed because he is tired of Alberta subsidizing other provinces while being ignored by Ottawa. Shirley and Dave Howard said they believe Alberta would be better off financially if it became independent.
The Stony Plain event was one of many organized by Stay Free Alberta to gather signatures in a referendum campaign sanctioned by the province’s chief electoral officer. The signing events had been running for three weeks, with long lines reported at sites across the province.
What the petition must do
The campaign operates under Alberta’s citizen initiative rules. Organizers have until May to collect 178,000 names — of which 10 per cent must be eligible voters from the last provincial election. The signatures must then be validated by the chief electoral officer before the petition can be presented to the Alberta government.
The proposed question asks whether Alberta should become a sovereign country and cease to be a province of Canada. Premier Danielle Smith’s government lowered the thresholds for citizen-initiated referendums after the April 2025 federal election and promised to honour a successful petition, though Smith herself says she prefers a sovereign Alberta within a united Canada. Her government had also struck a panel to tour the province hearing grievances with Ottawa, keeping the federation debate in the spotlight through the fall.
The separation drive is not the only petition in the field. A rival citizen initiative, Alberta Forever Canada, led by former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk, asked the opposite question — whether Alberta should remain in Canada — and was validated by Elections Alberta after collecting more than 400,000 signatures, illustrating how the sovereignty debate has mobilized both sides of the argument.
What happened next
The signature tables stayed busy through the winter. Stay Free Alberta said it collected more than 301,000 signatures between Jan. 3 and the May 2 deadline, though the figure was disputed. The petition then hit a legal wall: Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Blackfoot Confederacy challenged it, and on May 13, 2026, Justice Shaina Leonard ruled that Elections Alberta could not certify the petition. Smith said the same day that her government would appeal the decision.
The fight did not end there. Smith later folded the independence question into a multi-question provincial referendum her government set for October, alongside questions drawn from both the separatist and pro-Canada petitions — meaning the lineups that formed in Stony Plain in January ultimately helped push the question toward a provincewide vote, even as the courts weighed the petition itself.
