1. Your source is about Canada. But okay, it can be used as an example, fair enough.
2. Those are citizen-initiated petitions. It works a bit different in the EU unfortunately
3. I personally believe that increasing the fee is the best, if you want to destroy democracy. A way better solution to this problem would be to increase the number of signatures needed, or in an EU petition the percentage of yea-sayers.

Thanks though for the input, I liked it.