Mitch Sylvestre, leader of the separatist Stay Free Alberta movement, is complaining that Alberta's citizen initiative process isn't transparent enough, that it is unfaithful to the original purpose of the province's citizen initiative law. Advertisement AdvertisementAdvertisement AdvertisementAfter sorting through thousands of signatures and applying rigorous statistic sampling methods for determining how many were legitimate, Elections Alberta determined Stay Free Alberta had collected 222,597 signatures. Forever Canada had to abide by the older, much more stringent petition rules, rules the Stay Free Alberta campaign would have failed under. If the old standard (293,976 signatures) applied, Stay Free Alberta would have fallen short by more than 70,000 signatures. And under the old rules, campaigners had just 90 days to gather signatures compared to the current 120 — a whole extra month.