The final recommendations of Alberta’s Electoral Boundaries Commission released yesterday are probably about the best that could be expected given the ridiculous limitation that only two additional seats could be added to the Legislature’s current 87 despite the province’s burgeoning population.
After all, the commissioners had to draw the lines somewhere, and the way they drew them would see Calgary get two new seats and Edmonton gain one, while two rural electoral divisions were consolidated in Central Alberta. So, mostly, pretty much the same old same old.
But a minority report by the 2025-2026 commission’s two United Conservative Party appointed members, Lethbridge lawyer John Evans and retired University of Alberta professor Julian Martin, would slice the province’s cities into pizza pies of “rurban” ridings, diluting the Opposition NDP’s vote.
This signals that the report may be in serious trouble even before the ink on its pages is dry. Remember, the commission makes recommendations, but the Legislature, with its UCP majority, makes the decision.
Minority reports by individual commissioners are nothing new in Alberta Electoral Boundary Commission reports, which are drafted every eight to 10 years to account for population changes in the province. But minority reports by government-appointed members on the commission are extremely rare. And minority reports complete with maps illustrating Texas-style gerrymandering were unheard until yesterday.
It’s probably significant that when the commission issued its interim report last fall, the commissioners’ recommendations were unanimous. Now they are wildly at variance. Something happened, obviously, between then and now.
So would the government of Danielle Smith be bold enough to ignore the majority recommendations of a thoughtful independent report? Since the commission was established a year ago tomorrow, it’s held more than 30 public hearings throughout Alberta, in person and online. It received close to 2,000 written submissions.
Well, let me put it to you this way: I wouldn’t recommend betting against that happening. After all, Premier Danielle Smith is determined to remain in power and she’s already proved she’s prepared to tear up the rule book on any number of issues, from fundamental rights to public health care to separatism.
In the report, commission Chair Dallas Miller, a retired judge of the Alberta Court of King’s Bench, and the commission’s two NDP-appointed members, former Alberta Party MLA Greg Clark and Sylvan Lake resident Susan Samson, describe the maps presented by the two UCP members as, “1) procedurally unfair; 2) substantively unreasonable as an exercise of this Commission’s statutory mandate; and 3) likely to offend s. 3 of the Charter.”
“If the Legislature adopts the minority maps, it risks significant legal consequences by way of a court challenge that is likely to be successful,” they warned. “Even more importantly, it risks jeopardizing faith in Alberta democracy.”
Alas, jeopardizing faith in democracy might be small beer to Ms. Smith. And would a court challenge be successful in time to block an unfairly turbocharged UCP majority? Doubtful.
If this pizza-pie model sounds familiar, it may be because it reared its head last summer when Lethbridge-East MLA Nathan Neudorf submitted a recommendation to the commission calling for the southern Alberta city to be sliced up into three or four rural-urban ridings.
Boldly, the map accompanying the minority report would see Lethbridge divided into four rurban ridings, just as prescribed by Mr. Neudorf, who is the government’s utilities minister. So would Red Deer and Airdrie, while St. Albert, where a few local conservative supporters recently launched a recall petition against popular NDP MLA Marie Renaud, would be cut up into three.
The fringes of Alberta’s largest city would really get it under the minority proposal – 11 rurban gerrymanders around the city of Calgary.
Opposition NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi issued a milquetoast statement thanking the commission for its work and promising to review its recommendations. Later, though, he made tougher remarks to reporters, calling the minority report “nuts” and “obvious gerrymandering.”
“The fact that the UCP-appointed chair of the commission felt the need to write that it was unconstitutional and wrong tells you what you need to know,” Mr. Nenshi said.
For its part, the UCP didn’t reveal its intentions, letting UCP Caucus Whip Justin Wright issue a bland statement promising to review the report.
Now, about population growth in Alberta, Postmedia noted in its coverage that the population of Alberta has grown 20 per cent since 2024, while under the commission’s recommendations the seats in the Legislature will increase by 2 per cent.
But consider that in 1979 there were 79 seats in the Alberta Legislature and if the commission’s recommendations are accepted there will only be 89 after the next election, an increase of 12.7 per cent. In the same period, the population of Alberta has grown about 150 per cent!
OK, so why not increase the size of the Legislature to about 130 and build benches to accommodate the extra MLAs? Please don’t tell me that would cost too much. Isn’t democracy supposed to be worth the money? And 130 MLAs would sure as heck make for a more exciting and vibrant democracy!
I suppose it remains to be seen how the UCP responds to its MLAs urban/rural pizza riding proposal, which could make things even worse. However its general approach is already a big part of the problem.
Alberta’s population has grown a lot but the number of MLAs has not. Now that might not be as bad a problem if the growth was fairly evenly spread out, but as we know it has not been. Some more urban areas have grown a lot, while other more rural areas have not, or even had population declines.
So not adding enough MLAs now leaves everyone unhappy. The urban voters who are even more under represented and the rural voters whose ridings get physically bigger and bigger.
All this for the UCP to slavishy adhere to some ideological idea of keeping government small. Rather than start with an ideal number of MLAs, we should consider first what practically would work best for voters and MLAs. But of course being pragmatic has generally not been the current UCP’s strength.
The UCP will attempt anything to keep a vice grip on power. It is abhorrent. As it is, ridings like St. Albert are split, with a rurban riding, which makes no sense, given the differences between urban and rural concerns. St. Albert would suffice with one MLA for the city. Searle Turton, a UCP MLA, from the riding of Stony Plain/Spruce Grove, also wants this gerrymandering nonsense, so he can absorb a neighbouring Edmonton riding, which has an NDP MLA on it. In the previous provincial election, in 2023, the UCP saw their seat count greatly diminish, and since then, three more UCP cabinet ministers have left. The UCP’s sheer contempt for democracy is disgusting.
The number of MLAs in Alberta has been a sore point for me for some time, but I am afraid this is one of the few times I don’t agree with David.
Alberta has 37 Members of Parliament, who somehow manage to get the job done. With a population of about one third of the province, Calgary gets by with 15 councillors (and mayor), which would extrapolate to 45 for the province; likewise, with one quarter of the province, Edmonton seems to function with 13 municipal politicians which extrapolates to 52 for the province.
I would argue, then, that the appropriate number of MLAs would be somewhere between 40 and 50. It really goads me when an austerity bent government cuts lots of other people’s jobs, but can’t bring themselves to cut some of their own.
I one hundred percent agree! We need fewer MLAs, not more. Make those slackers work a lot harder for the vote & their constituents.
This is what the MAGAs did in Texas to neuter the progressives in Austin. Suckers.
Yes, the 30 mile wide riding which is 100 miles long. Does make things more difficult for progressives in Austin.
Smith is not interested in democracy she is only interested in staying in office along with her friends. If they weren’t in politics where else would they get such well paid jobs with their lack of ……………just about everything which makes a good politician.
Given she seems so “entranced” by trump perhaps she might even start taking high security clearance memos home with her and dropping bombs on B.C.
People need to think a bit before they vote.
Dani Sh*t and her merry little UPC’ers will redraw the boundaries, to suit their agenda of less democracy and a more Authoritarian system, just like Trump. They need to do this in order for them to retain power, so they can continue with their deprivation of the environment, minority rights and the right to access public healthcare. The list is endless and all this in the name of greed and corruption.
89 seats in the Legislature is already too many.
Many rural UCP MLAs are likely to see the Texas style gerrymander in the minority report as a life line. If it is to be stopped, city councils will have to step up to the plate and urban UCP MLAs have to feel the heat. Lethbridge and Red Deer have had two MLAs each for like forever. I can’t imagine residents in those cities having their representation diluted by being lumped in with their rural cousins.
Alberta has crossed the Rubicon. It’s so not an aneurysm. It’s informal apoplexy by the Oxford definition: “incapacity or speechlessness caused by extreme anger.”
https://youtube.com/shorts/yNrwAeHqUPo?si=JClrRFPiaeZXLzm1
Help! We need an intervention.
Get rid of single member winner take all seats. Alberta needs to adopt STV a proportional voting system like we had in urban areas 100 years ago. Then gerrymandering would be a non issue.
I have to agree with a few other commentators and disagree with DJC. More MLAs does not make either democracy or the government more responsive. I need to start by acknowledging that this will never happen, but we need to reduce the number of MLAs. With an AB population of 5 million, let’s go with 100,000 per riding and have a nice round number of 50 MLAs. With all the modern communication tools, regardless of the physical size of the riding, a MLA can be as accessible as he/she wants to be.
Just as at the federal level, more MLAs/MPs does not equal better. With power more and more concentrated in the hands of cabinet and the Premier’s or PMO’s office, and iron fisted party discipline, one can go all the way back to PET, who even then referenced backbenchers as ‘trained seals’, for an assessment of their value. The majority of MLAs do as they are told and little else.
As austerity is forced on the rest of us, let’s have MLAs do more with less.
“Rurban” = gerrymandering to further dilute the electoral influence of the urban majority. It is right out of the MAGA/Republican playbook. It’s time for 1 vote to have the same influence as every other vote. No “rurban” ED’s. Urban seats for Red Deer, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Leduc, Grand Prairie, Ft. McMurray, St. Albert, Ft. Saskatchewan, and any other city I’m not remembering right now. It’s time for Alberta to be a democracy again.
Your comment would carry more weight if you knew HOW TO SPELL GRANDE PRAIRIE.
The majority report discusses the potential pitfalls of a strict, US-style “rep by pop” model for creating electoral districts. I suggest you read it.
Jerry: Correcting small errors and typos like that are all part of the service here, and I missed that one. So the fault is partly mine. DJC
Sorry, it’s a pet peeve of mine — like putting two ‘l’s in Vermilion. Note, Alberta has two towns with that word in their names — Vermilion, located in eastern Alberta along the Yellowhead Highway #16 on the way to Lloydminster … and Fort Vermilion, located way up north on the banks of the Peace River, about 50 miles (80 km) east of High Level. (I lived there for a few years back in the late 80s).
Neither of those towns spell “Vermilion” with two ‘l’s, but I see it rendered that way all the time.
As for Grand Prairie, spelled without the ‘e’, it’s in Texas: a suburb of Dallas.
Jerry: I am forgiving of typos, perhaps because I make so many, including Clagary, where I lived for many years. As I’ve said in this space before, what drives me bonkers in CBC announcers saying “going westbound” and the like, when one can either be westbound or going west. Also, with the exception of commissioned officers in the RCMP, there is no distinction between police and civilians, they are all civilians. DJC
Setting riding boundaries is squarely in the court were squares live. Psephology–everything to do with elections–must be some kind of masochism for BC which has been tortured with so-called “electoral reform”, euphemism for ‘WE WANT PRO-REP AND WE WANT IT NOW!!!’, four times in the past two decades already, if you count the aborted federal stab. Looks like Avi Lewis wants stick the ole broom-handle in the pail and stir it up again. I guess we must be due –or maybe we musta done somebody wrong.
I’m copo about the workings of our riding boundary commissions, and participated in a number of them. Even though I didn’t always get my way, I found them reasonable and fair. Two commissions in a row amended the proposed boundary adjustments the way many of us wanted, but we were warned our region was growing so fast and local populations distributed in such a way that our little community which used to be in the Vancouver Island North riding would inevitably have to be rolled into the adjacent riding to the south. It would plainly be done for population reasons, not partisan ones.
Nonetheless I dutifully protested, cited most everything outlined in the Alberta report (principles are almost identical toBC’s), anything that might allow exception to the population +/- 25% rule, whined that everybody shops in the Comox Valley 12 miles to the north and that nobody ever goes 42 miles over “The Hump” to the Alberni Valley, or knows anyone there– heck, never even heard of the place (well, most of that’s true), but apparently to no avail. We’ve been on the periphery of our riding where we don’t do business, shopping, doctors appointments, high schools for the past ten years.
I must say, though, our MP Gord Johns has proved an excellent and rare breed, a federal New Democrat, still standing, who contested the newly created riding in 2015 and won incumbencies in 2019, 2021, and 2025. The Commission was nice enough to call the new riding “Courtenay-Alberni” even though it only includes the smallest smidgen of the farthest outlying satellites of Courtenay–maybe just the very line on the ground marking the city limit. But I don’t really have any complaints about the new boundary.
It’s important to note that the riding was created before Donald F tRump entered the 2016 presidential race. The reality TV star who looked coifed by a hay-baler took George “Dubya’s” dodgy 2000 election to a whole new level. His campaign behaviour was gallingly boorish and crude, and when he beat Democrat Hillary Clinton he immediately accused Democrats of vote-rigging –repeat: even though he won.
Clinton garnered 3 million more votes but the goofy Electoral College awarded the win to tRump. She of course graciously conceded the loss, in keeping with the decorum accorded the most powerful office in the world, probably praying the death of propriety wasn’t at hand. But The Donald was just getting warmed up.
Within a week of Inauguration Day he’d already blasphemed all pretence of decorum and got the ball rolling to scandal a corruption the likes of which was never imagined before. Soon his election day whining seemed like a minor faux pas. In retrospect it was a harbinger of thorough and coordinated corruption of all things psephological.
We’ve learned a lot about US psephology which, of course, requires study of the Constitution and its founding principals. Thanks, Donald! It’s weird enough already, and the US electorate so appallingly ignorant that tRump easily makes a mockery of it. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if he makes up his offences on the fly in his “transactional,” strategically gormless way simply to get away with whatever pickle he’s in, or if he has a cogent plan to destroy any trust in US elections so’s to replace it with the kind of dictatorship JD Vance dreams of inheriting. I’m inclined to believe he’s 100% tactical and that other dark actors are taking advantage of him to achieve the white supremacist agenda their great-great-great granddaddies dreamed of. As long’s he doesn’t run out of legal scrapes they’re assured he will continue to blackmail, primary, leverage, and cheat to throw adversaries off his trail –like he’s always done. Crooked, now-disbarred layers suggested that his VP Mike Pence would drive his 2020 defeat through a loophole and he believed it would work. The first attack on the Capitol since British Marines occupied and torched it in 1814 ensued. The US election system survived, but trust was taken down another notch.
Now, in tRump 2.0, he takes no comfort that he won 2024, probably fairly and more or less squarely. Is it his increasingly obvious cognitive decline that lets him think he’ll run for a third term by his usual dirty tricks or is it a reasonable if despicable ploy to disrupt the approaching midterms purely to avoid impeachment when the Dems regain the House (and maybe the Senate too)? Who is manipulating him? Who is telling him he absolutely must reduce the once great nation to a tinpot fascist regime for his own personal good? This passes for daily news. Not that he’s ever missed an opportunity to get away with stuff just for its own sake, but has he diminished enough to imagine new duds as the real evil-doers stroke him while he sinks ever lower behind the Resolution Desk every waking and dozing moment?
Canadians rightly worried about MAGAdumb infiltrating northward. Rightly so: we had United-We-Roll and the Jan6 copycat Freedumb convoy. We have PP whose tRump-like rhetoric caused the most astounding political action this country has seen in a long time. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, especially when CPC MPs started caterwauling about foreign interference: I thought, whoa boy!–here it comes: pretty soon our politicians will be accusing each other of vote rigging as a matter of course. Yet much to my relief the MAGA infiltration has been fairly light and contained within the political and partisan realms, not the psephological. Canadians aren’t afraid to vote, no government is threatening to deploy armed guards around voting places in order to intimidate voters. PP’s 2014 Democratic Reform bill –almost entirely repealed as soon’s the Liberals won power–wasn’t anything near so scary.
Nevertheless, one has to worry about Alberta, not really about separation (which is not legally possible anyway), but about Danielle Smith who’s been known to confuse her authority with that of a US presidunce, to extol various Americanisms like private healthcare, stand-your-ground gun rights, &c. The real worry is her psephological perversions to those ends–in this case US-style gerrymandering. Anything she might do with the boundary commission’s report that’s out of the ordinary is suspect, naturally. Like tRump we have to wonder what she might do, either on ulteriorly motivated bad advice or her own ignorant council.
Her modus operandi seems to be to push every button that offends and outrages –unsurprisingly very tRump-like, but like certain Freedumbites who argued their 2nd amendment rights in court, her recklessness doesn’t particularly need to know what the difference between Canadian and US psephology. And there’s a lot.
Naturally our “effective representation” could be sharpened tho cut closer to “one person, one vote” but increasing the number of ridings to rationalize something like that is bound to incite long and weary debate. Psephology is already dorky enough.
The Commission’s recommendation seems reasonable enough, the rules are simple and there’s no particular reason for voters to distrust the process. The Commissioners were correct in comparing Alberta’s boundary rules with other provinces and contrast it with American psephological principles which, in many ways, Canada cannot constitutionally do–provinces do not conduct federal elections, for example.
There’ll be another commission. Now isn’t the time, nor is the electorate much prepared to tackle some of the basic problems all Canadian boundary commissions face. But now is always a good time to become a psephology wonk. Lotta fun at parties too.