[petercooper]

These petitions are a relatively new thing and have never (please someone jump in and correct me if I'm wrong) lead to anything meaningful.

For a very small value of "meaningful", I signed a petition when the government made suggestions they would be moving businesses to submitting tax returns four times a year. The response was not actually a change in policy but a pretty good explanation of the miscommunication over what they were actually planning to do and why it wasn't worth getting worried about. So at least as a way to get the government to explain their intentions more clearly, it worked.