Members we love you! We are very happy that we have had so many people step up over the last few months and purchase $10 memberships and $100 Founding Memberships. We could not have had a Founding Convention, A Stampede Barbecue and a Launch Event without you! Nothing would have been accomplished without you, and you are appreciated.

So why would we now offer free membership? Well, it is not because you are not valued, that is for sure. We value each and every member.

This is the situation that we are working with...

New legislation has come out from the province allowing municipal parties. In these new rules we need to gather 1000 member signatures and then submit them as part of the process to the City of Calgary. While we already had hundreds of members we needed more and we also needed them on signature sheets. They can't just be electronic signatures.

Also we had to comply to the new provincial guidelines and change our entity from an incorporation to a proper society. During the interim all of the assets of the entity went into a trust. Then they got moved to the society. The society is already active but the party is not official until we have the 1000 signatures submitted. During the interim we are also not able to conduct business financially. This means we cannot collect money or pay expenses. This presented a bit of a conundrum. How could we get the 1000 memberships, and gather the signatures, when we can't collect money?

The solution was to offer free membership for a limited time to meet the necessary criteria. We expect that by the end of December we will have more than enough signatures and memberships will soon after have a fee once again.

Want to help us collect the signatures? This is the link to get the forms to fill out.

Please download the forms and print them out. Get people to fill them out and sign them. When they do this, they become free members and we will add them to our data base, but more importantly we will get our 1000 signatures so we can move forward.

How to collect signatures:

• Get friends and family to sign over the holidays.
• Take the forms along to political events and business events. Ask for a table if that is available.
• Put a team of a few people together and do some door knocking in your neighborhood. This is a great exercise for candidates to start getting out there, but anyone could do it.
• Ask business owners to collect them at the till in their business.

It will only take 20 people gathering 50 signatures each, and we will be finished!

What to do with them once you have the signatures:

Bring them back to A Better Calgary Party at our Christmas Event on December 16th, or turn them in at your Ward meeting.

We are also looking for 5 businesses to step up in the city where people can drop them off. We will add them to the bottom of this page when we have them.