Just over two years into her term, Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek is facing a recall petition.
The City of Calgary said it received a notice-of-recall petition against the sitting mayor on Jan. 30, and has verified it complies with the recall criteria laid out in the Municipal Government Act.
But the bar to reach for a citizen-led process to remove a mayor outside of an election is a high one: 40 per cent of the electorate must sign the petition within 60 days.
The petition’s representative, listed as a Landon Johnston, has from Feb. 5 to April 4 to collect 514,284 signatures of Calgarians who are eligible to vote. That’s 40 per cent of the 1,285,711 who were in the 2019 Municipal Affairs Population List for Calgary.
Following that time period, city officials have 45 days to evaluate whether the petition meets the MGA criteria. The city clerk must provide their findings at the first council meeting after that.
The ability to launch a recall petition came in the Recall Act in 2021, which amended the Municipal Government Act effective April 2022.
The Village of Ryley, population 483, became the first municipality in the province to successfully use the recall petition process to oust former mayor Nick Lee.
According to a poll published in December 2023, Gondek and the rest of city council have suffered from low and declining popularity since the start of their term in 2021. The ThinkHQ poll said men offered harsher appraisals of the mayor than women and the mayor’s ratings tended to decline with the age of Calgarians polled. And wealthier households and more established communities had more concentrated disapproval of Gondek.
Since the Recall Act was passed in the legislature, there has been chatter on social media about launching a recall petition against Calgary’s mayor, but this is the first one to be launched.
More to come…
–with files from Sarah Reid, Global News
