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Canadian country music singer Corb Lund said he’s “frustrated, but not surprised” after being told by Elections Alberta that the citizens’ petition he spearheaded to ban coal mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains, didn’t have enough verified signatures to proceed.
In an interview with Global News on Tuesday, Lund said, “We feel that the process used by Elections Alberta was unreasonable and not fair — and I think it disenfranchised a lot of Albertans who got out, made their way to sign off on our petition.”
Elections Alberta said in a news release on July 3 that 196,000 valid signatures were counted, but only about 172,000 were able to be verified. Therefore the petition was determined to be “unsuccessful.”
In order to be successful, the the group Water, Not Coal needed to collect 177,732 verified signatures.
Lund said the group was allowed to have a lawyer in the room where the signatures were being counted and “she’s got a laundry list of stuff that went on in there that was not fair.”
Elections Alberta claimed, “the primary reasons signatures were rejected during the verification phase included electors being unable or unwilling to verify the information on the petition sheet and not providing valid contact information to reach them for verification.”
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However, Lund claims the verification process was tainted by the recent massive privacy breach that resulted in the personal information of three million Alberta voters being allegedly obtained and published by an Alberta separatist group.
“You’re asking people to provide their personal information to a stranger with a random number when on Election Alberta’s own website, they warn people not to give your information out to random numbers because of the data breach,” Lund said.
In an email to Global News, Elections Alberta said the sampling methods it used are used “in jurisdictions across North America conducting similar electoral citizen petition processes.”
Because Elections Alberta was unable to call every person who signed the petition, 384 people were asked to verify their information, and when the results are extrapolated and applied to the full list of signatures, it provides a 95 per cent confidence level, plus or minus a 5 per cent margin of error.
However, Lund claimed that because of the data breach “and the way the math works — the mass extrapolation — in our opinion, it was unfair and it was not a reasonable way to assess this at all.”
Speaking at an unrelated news conference in Calgary on Monday, Premier Danielle Smith said, “I’ve had a chance to meet with Mr. Lund, and I told him that if his petition was not successful, let’s work together on addressing some of the concerns that have been raised.”
“We’ve already addressed them in substantive ways. We’ve purchased leases and freehold for over 40,000 hectares in this target area in response to the fact that people want these landscapes to stay pristine. We have also banned mountaintop removal and open pit mining on future development so that we can make sure that we don’t end up potential selenium problems like we’ve seen elsewhere and we’re also mandating that you have to use the best available technology when it comes to water management,” Smith added.
“This has been an issue for some time. We responded to it through the various policies that we have. There may be more that we can do, but we’ll continue to have that conversation.”
However, Lund accuses the provincial government of “playing games.”
“If it’s being characterized that she and are on the same page, she and I are not on the same page. What’s happening is the same tactic that the government’s been using for six years. I’ve been in this fight longer than her and longer than her ministers, except for Brian Jean,” Lund said.
“I’ve gone to three sets of ministers, and every single time, over and over, they say, oh, yeah, we’ve heard Albertans, we’re going to fix it. Except for this loophole and that loophole,” Lund said.
This latest setback is just the most recent for opponents of coal mining.
Lund’s first application for a petition on the issue was cancelled in December 2025, when the Alberta government changed the legislation surrounding such petitions, forcing him to reapply.
Even if it had enough valid signatures, Smith had already said it was likely too late to add a question about coal mining to October’s list of referendum questions.
Lund said the group is now considering what its legal options might be — including the possibility of asking for a judicial review.
“Get this whole thing, this whole process before a judge and see if the judge thinks it’s fair, right. Everyone on our team and everyone we talked to seems to think we have a very strong case for a winning judicial review.”
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
