Good morning, everyone.

Last week, Alberta separatist leader Mitch Sylvestre said his group, Stay Free Alberta, had reached the goal of 178,000 signatures needed to force the province to hold an independence referendum.

The deadline to reach that threshold is May 2, after which Elections Alberta will need to verify the signatures. But depending on how a Court of King’s Bench judge rules after a three-day hearing this week where several First Nations are attempting to block the signature petition, everything could change.

Or, maybe not.

“The government – even if [the courts] put an injunction on this – can call an independence referendum on their own,” Sylvestre told The Globe and Mail’s Matthew Scace last week.

Alberta’s separatists have been stymied by the courts before. Last year, Justice Colin Feasby, also of the Court of King’s Bench, was asked by Alberta’s chief electoral officer to review Sylvestre’s proposed referendum question: “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be part of Canada and become an independent state?” and determine if it violated Charter rights.

He ruled that the province’s direct democracy rules did not permit a separatist bid for a referendum.

But Premier Danielle Smith’s government then reformed the Citizen Initiative Act. Referendum questions would now be allowed to contravene the Canadian Constitution, with the caveat that the Alberta government wouldn’t be forced to implement the result of a referendum if acting on it would violate the Constitution.

So, Sylvestre has been operating under the reformed rules. And while he says he can’t force the government to do anything, he’s confident he will have made his case, no matter what the courts rule.

“They’re going to make a decision on whether or not the legislation that they passed in order to allow us to do this – and allow citizens to actually have a say in whatever democracy we have here – should be upheld or not,” he said of the Smith government.

The government, for its part, has said that any citizen initiative that gets the requisite number of signatures will get a place on the Oct. 19 referendum ballot the province has scheduled for several other questions.

“I guess we’ll see what happens with the court and whether they get the signatures,” Smith said on Thursday.

Justice Shaina Leonard is weighing the argument by First Nations lawyers that their treaty rights have been violated by the separatists’ signature petition.

Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation wants Justice Leonard to suspend the petition by reinstating the constitutional protections the province stripped from the citizen-initiative legislation. Counsel for Athabasca Chipewyan and the Blackfoot Confederacy has asked for the Alberta chief electoral officer’s approval of the separatist petition to be suspended.

“Alberta’s pattern of conduct has lost it the moral authority to simply say, ‘Trust us. We’ll get it right next time. We’ll get it right later in this process – wait until the referendum result and we will protect your rights in the implementation of that result,’” said Kevin Hille, counsel for Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation this week.

“Alberta has not shown itself to be a reliable or trustworthy treaty partner, or to have the protection and fulfilment of treaty promises at heart at all.”

Jeffrey Rath, meanwhile, a separatist leader and one of the lawyers representing Sylvestre, called the idea that an independence referendum would violate treaty rights “pure speculation.”

“I haven’t heard any of my friends explain at all, in any circumstance whatsoever, how a treaty right is infringed by the legislature of Alberta setting out a process by which citizens can communicate potential constitutional amendments to the legislature by way of petition,” he argued on Thursday.

Government lawyers, also participating in the hearing, asked Justice Leonard to exercise “judicial restraint” in her decision because the province believes it’s too early to determine if treaty rights would be violated by an independence referendum.

“We are at the opening moments of what we would think of as something like a five-act play,” said Neil Dobson.

Justice Leonard is now deliberating and has said her ruling would come quickly.

This is the weekly Alberta newsletter written by Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.