Your source is about Canada. But okay, it can be used as an example, fair enough.
Those are citizen-initiated petitions. It works a bit different in the EU unfortunately
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.
Or just do what we are doing, but in reverse!
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/citizen-petition-referendum-increase-9.7021761
Thanks though for the input, I liked it.