Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government served notice in the provincial Legislature yesterday morning it intends to toss out the entire report of the 2025-2026 Electoral Boundaries Commission.
Instead, the motion would spike the commission’s recommendation and hand the job off to a special MLA committee than can be depended upon to act in the partisan interests of the governing party.
When the motion is put to the Assembly and passed – which it will be thanks to the UCP majority in the House – the job of drawing the province’s electoral boundaries will be given to a stacked committee of four UCP MLAs and two New Democrats.
This is a remarkable development, unprecedented as far as electoral boundary commissions go, but not a complete surprise.
After all, the government’s been dropping hints it would do something like this since the two UCP-appointed members of the five-member commission came up with a minority report that would slice the province’s cities into pizza pies of “rurban” ridings, diluting the Opposition NDP’s vote.
It has also shown contempt for electoral norms in the past, as it did in 2022 when it refused to call a by-election in Calgary-Elbow, which had no MLA and where the NDP had a shot at winning, at the same time as it held one in Brooks-Medicine Hat to give Premier Danielle Smith a safe rural seat.
Since the two UCP appointees on the commission, Lethbridge lawyer John Evans and retired University of Alberta professor Julian Martin, had agreed to the body’s interim report last fall, it was obvious something happened to make them change their minds before the final report came out on March 26. It’s hard to imagine there was no pressure on them from the government to sabotage the final report.
The UCP is moving ahead with this unprecedented plan to circumvent the boundary commission’s recommendations because the majority of the commission’s members did their job and produced riding boundaries that properly reflected changes in the population of Alberta since the last official electoral map was drawn in 2017.
This would have ensured that, as much as possible given the limit of 89 seats imposed on the non-partisan commission by the government, a general election would have reflected the wishes of Albertans.
But the United Conservative Party and the cabal of ideological Americanizers that leads it obviously intend to win the next election whether or not that reflects the will of the people.
So while we will hear plenty of talk from UCP cabinet ministers in the next few days about democracy and democratic principles, that is not what this is about. This is about winning at all costs and at any cost, the will of the people be damned.
They are counting on most Alberta voters not to be paying any attention to what’s happening and, if they hear of it, to dismiss it as meaningless political inside baseball. This hope is probably justified.
The mechanism will be gerrymandering of the sort expected in Republican U.S. states, most notably Texas. In the context of the current news cycle, though, a better way of saying this might be Hungarian-style. Who knows? Perhaps the UCP will bring in soon-to-depart Hungarian prime Minister Viktor Orbán as an advisor.
After the commission was established on March 25, 2025, it held more than 30 public hearings throughout Alberta, in person and online. It received close to 2,000 written submissions.
All of this and the money we taxpayers spent on it will now go out the window because the UCP is unwilling to take the chance the people of Alberta have not cottoned on to the implications of dismantling public health care, suspending the Charter rights of large groups of citizens, and pushing separation from Canada, just to name a few unpopular policies.
In the Legislature yesterday, Premier Smith claimed the majority of the commission’s members wanted to raise the number of seats in the House from 87 to 91. As is often the case with things Premier Smith says, this was not true.
While Commission Chair Dallas Miller, a retired Court of King’s Bench judge, did say 91 seats would better reflect the population change in Alberta since the last boundary redrawing, the commission followed the government’s instructions and stuck with the number they were given.
As Opposition leader Naheed Nenshi told the Assembly yesterday, “this is not a recommendation of the commission and no amount of gaslighting will fix that problem.” True, but it is also not the real issue here. Alberta should have more seats in the Legislature so its population can be properly represented. But they shouldn’t be cut up like pizza slices to ensure nobody but the UCP can ever form a government.
The UCP also claims the province needs more rural representation, although since Alberta’s population growth is concentrated in cities, this is a misrepresentation too. That said, ridings based on the Pizza Pie Principle will represent their rural electors as poorly as their urban ones.
We need to face it, though, that this is just a plan to cheat, pure and simple, with a strong possibility the UCP will get away with it.
As 2025 commission member Greg Clark – a former Alberta Party MLA for Calgary-Elbow – wrote in a useful thread on social media, “In Canada, we don’t want elected officials drawing their own election maps. Instead, governments give independent commissions the job of drawing maps that reflect population trends while also respecting the challenges of representing diverse, rural and remote communities.”
Meanwhile, the possibility of legal challenges is real, although unlikely to produce a timely result. The three majority commissioners warned in March that if the government were to implement the minority report, “it risks significant legal consequences by way of a court challenge that is likely to be successful. Even more importantly, it risks jeopardizing faith in Alberta democracy.”
While the report quickly drafted by the stacked MLA committee chaired by Leduc-Beaumont MLA Brandon Lunty may look a little different from the Electoral Boundary Commission’s minority report, it’s goal and strategy to achieve it are likely to be the same. Electoral dysfunction will be the intended result.
The UCP, obviously, doesn’t care about ensuring faith in democracy any more than its role models in the Trump Republican Party south of the Canada-U.S. boundary. And it is confident it can act quickly enough to avoid legal consequences.
While I agree the UCP may not pay a very high political price for this right away, overturning an independent electoral commission and the likely resulting court challenges is not a good look for the UCP headed towards an election.
Another lingering scandal could erode support further for them and they risk becoming more identified with scandal and corruption in the public mind. This can be politically corrosive and is a big part of what did in the leader of Hungary.
The UCP must be more worried about their support than we realize, to risk this. It is not the sort of thing a confident government would even need to do. Also Smith is already trying to confuse things by conflating having more MLAs and rejecting the commission report. It is actually probably not a bad idea to have a few more MLAs given the population growth, but that may not be any easier to defend politically than their planned gerrymandering. Its to bad Smith didn’t figure out more MLAs were needed earlier, it would have saved a lot of time and money if she did. So this does not make her look very bright, just politically calculating.
This should be very concerning to all Albertans. It is a blatant attack on our democracy, by the UCP and Danielle Smith, plain and simple. With the UCP, they have never been known to win a provincial election honestly. Hearken back to 2019, when the Kamikaze scandal happened, and the UCP were elected. Four years later, during the provincial election in Alberta, the UCP and Danielle Smith were misleading voters, and enticing them with bribes, including $600. At that time, the UCP’s majority government had shrunk considerably. This time, we are seeing the UCP’s government at the risk of defeat, in the provincial election in 2027, because they are doing enough things to peeve people off. So, the UCP and Danielle Smith have to be very devious, and try something else to maintain their stronghold on power. As a result, we have gerrymandering. Having a hypocritical base, there will be supporters of the UCP and Danielle Smith who will squawk at the Liberal government in Ottawa, led by Mark Carney for not showing concerns about democracy, which isn’t the situation, but they will not condemn the UCP and Danielle Smith for their actions, which are absolutely undemocratic.
Say, is that a repurposed goldenish-coppery cat I see around the premier’s neck?
I bet Viktor Orbán would never do a thing like this. Oh, wait. He did?
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/04/16/how-viktor-orban-got-rolled-by-his-own-gerrymander/
Isn’t that something? It’s a good thing all that IDU plotting and scheming is far removed from our province. Oh, wait…
The UPC Corporation, under Danielle Smith and her supporters, are some of the biggest whiners I’ve ever seen. A bunch of three year olds, that when they don’t get their way, they cry / whine, even cheat to get what they deem is theirs. To throw out a valid report, that I helped pay for with my taxes, is total incompetence! Then to start a new recommendation, that is going to be extremely slanted in the UCP’s favor is not only corrupt, but it should be criminal as well. And she does all this with a smile. This “Femme Fatalle” has Albertans wrapped around her little finger and she’s playing a dangerous game with our rights, our children’s rights and our future. This UPC Corp. and all their fanatics need to be sent to Alligator Alcatraz.
Not that it wasn’t perfectly clear before, but now there is absolutely no doubt Dingy Smith is going full dictatorship with no bounds what-so-ever. She probably has a copy of “Mein Kampf” always within arms reach. I don’t think she needs Hungarian prime Minister Viktor Orbán as an advisor, since she is already in the throws of a full on attack on democracy. Albertans should be scared and should be speaking out. Let’s look at some the similarities: Porno Dan wants to censor what people can read, we have the start of the UCP gestapo, kick out the RCMP that might hold the UCP to laws, rig the elections so they have total power, disregard the constitution for labor unions, kick as many people off AISH as possible, privatize health care, protect ministers family members from scrutiny, steal peoples pensions, pay profitable oil companies millions of tax dollars to clean up the mess they made, disregarding lawful petitions to stay in Canada to favor separation, just to name a few. It looks like there is no limit to what Smith will do.
This is outrageous, and we don’t support in anyway what the Premier is doing. Our support of the Conservative government in Alberta will be completely ended if the Premier moves ahead with this. We do not want Republican type gerrymandering in Canada!! It’s undemocratic and a way to override the democratic rights and will of the people.
DJC, as you point out, the outcome of this new committee’s recommendations are already known.
My question is (and I apologize if it has been answered elsewhere), what will be the timing of the boundary re-draw? Will the UCP implement these changes prior to the next election (currently scheduled for October 2027)?
Dave: My best guess would be, (1) weeks not months, and (2) yes. The only suspense for me is whether or niot the NDP will participate in this charade. DJC
This is ridiculous; ALBERTA IS ALREADY GERRYMANDERED beyond belief. Rural ridings with tiny slivers of the population already get the same representation as hundreds of thousands of people do in urban ridings. The fact that the UCP knows this, AND knows they need even more RIDICULOUS gerrymandering to stay in power really just illustrates that they are LOSERS, to a person. This bird will be reserving some choice words for these losers, should I run into them. I have more to say but this is a family blog. Really pathetic, even for Yankee Doodle Dani and the rest of her maple maga caucus.
A little bird close to Viktor Orbán tweeted “extreme malapportionment” in their ears, perhaps.
Who needs a rattlesnake on a Gadsden flag when you can have a “python democracy”, using democracy to strangle itself?
Wacky, wacky stuff. Prog dog-whistles that are just as goofy as the Kon emissions. Orban was a fascist and his replacement is a fascist who immediately invited Netanyahu to come to Hungary. “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just concluded a “warm introductory conversation” with Hungarian prime minister-elect Peter Magyar, the Prime Minister’s Office says in a statement, three days after Magyar ousted Netanyahu’s longtime ally Viktor Orban.” Israel has killed 1073 Palestinians in the West Bank in the last thirty months. It has killed 75 000 people in Gaza. It has killed 1400 civilians in Lebanon in the last eight weeks. The Carney Banker has condemned the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, but in the context of this statement from the PM Office on Palestinian statehood: “in no way compromises Canada’s steadfast support for the State of Israel, its people, and their security – security that can only ultimately be guaranteed through the achievement of a comprehensive two-state solution.” So in a post-national state like Canada we support the creation of two states so that one can remain an ethnonationalist colonial settler entity on 90% of the land stolen from the Arabs. Progs love them some imperialism. The little quibbles that progs have with folks like Marlaina do not revolve around dismantling a system predicated on a rent-seeking ownership class and a servant class, it’s just about how much welfare state the capitalists will begrudgingly accord the great unwashed. Canadian progs love their single-payer healthcare, but can’t quite bring themselves to face the fact that is only under threat because the people who actually own the economy have no use for it. If you liked the master-servant relationship of the last two hundred years, you’re going to love the new paradigm where the .01% doesn’t even need you as a consumer in the era of AI.
Say what you will about no two state solution, time was even the PLO agreed to that. It’s not the Palestinians who object to a two state solution, it’s the Zionists. Just look at how they behave in Lebanon and Syria; all they believe in is “greater Israel”.
Say what you will about Carney, and really do feel free to say what you will, you cannot deny the alternative would have been catastrophic. Not only is Pp naive as hell and full of bluster, but he slavishly worships the Donald and chances are much greater he wouldn’t have kept us out of this rapidly deteriorating situation.
In fact I would challenge that out of all the leaders in the west, Carney and Sheinbaum are the only two that seem to have their heads remotely screwed on correctly.
Carney is very much in the vein of a classical liberal, that is a conservative who has maybe some more Modern ideas about economic theory, or thinks women belong in the workplace too, but is very much a capitalist with capitalist ideals and capitalist loyalties.
How has the liberal party ever not been this ? Let’s also state that a LOT of liberal voters know this is what they’re getting and it’s what they want, it’s the country we live in. Whinging about the prime minister not being a card carrying socialist revolutionary broadly misses the point of why people like him keep getting elected here.
@Murphy,
It’s the *short-sightedness* and utter stupidity of these techno-feudal lords that I don’t understand.
They wanna run the world owning companies where nobody has the money to buy anything because the wages are so low. They wanna suck rents out of people who will have no means to pay them. They wanna be kowtowed to by a perpetual service class but they don’t wanna pay them enough to survive to do that kowtowing. They wanna run huge AI data centres to spy on who? when they’ve culled 90% of the population. They wanna financialize everything for their benefit but how many of them will be left standing after they cannibalize each other in a world where money means less and less due to inflation? They don’t care if they destroy the very planet they live on if it means “owning the libs/greenies” and the dollar meaning of those profits becomes a pittance when you can’t find water.
At the end of all that they think they’re going to hide in holes in the ground with a bunch of paid mercenaries to stave off the peasants after they’ve wrecked the place. How long do they think those mercenaries will let them live when the money they’re paying them is worthless?
Wealth is making these people mentally ill because their ability to reach logical conclusions is non-functional.
B: Now that we are enjoying late capitalism, as *someone* might have put it although I’m pretty sure he never actually used that term, the parts of the world dominated by neoliberalism don’t actually make anything to sell to us members of the human surplus (proletariat no more). The goal of the AI revolution is to replace all human workers and direct the profits of work done by AI entirely into the pockets of the .0001%. Dystopic, I know, but the Uber Bosses seem to have persuaded themselves that they are supermen and the rest of us are barely human, if that. DJC
@DJC
They’re just shuffling dollar numbers on a computer screen and they’re like kids playing a computer game…they think numbers going up shows they’ll gain a level.
Except when those numbers don’t mean anything because they’ve stopped making/farming/advancing anything…it’s just a game.
Ever see that meme of a skeleton gamer that can’t stop playing? Looks suspiciously like Peter Theil.
The mistake us peons make is thinking that we can upset them by marching around like penguins or voting. It’s utter stupidity. They don’t hate us any more than a stomping foot hates the ants it crushes. We’re *irrelevant* to them.
The only way to get their attention is to stop those numbers from going up or make them drop.
The liberal class are the *worst* solution to this crisis because they’ve convinced themselves and everyone else that “peaceful protest” is Gandhi wandering aimlessly with a picket sign. He didn’t. He engaged in direct actions and work stoppages that ground their money machine to a halt. Add in Bhagat Singh, who actually scared them so much they executed him and they started to change their plans.
Then turned India over to the next set of the crapitalist caste they approved, of.
Today CTV has a Canadian Press report that Elections Alberta said it could not make the changes in time for Oct 2027 unless perhaps by spending more money on it.
Typical of the sloppy amateurish UCP not bothering to think ahead before it makes another stupid costly decision.
@Val
Because they know they’re going to win this election. They want to gerrymander the one after when their chances to win, drop.
Not enough of my fellow mice who live here in the Sylvestre constituency are literate enough to watch Tommy Douglas and his famous fable of Mouseland and figure it out to make any difference. Cats will continue to feast. I have to give the cats credit for manipulating so skillfully. Cheese please. Mouseland was made famous in the 1940’s!
BTW: Happy Birthday, Rachel with reverence and respect.
“it risks significant legal consequences by way of a court challenge that is likely to be successful. Even more importantly, it risks jeopardizing faith in Alberta democracy.”
It risks jeopardizing faith in Alberta democracy – well this is exactly what the UCP wants so it does work well for them.
Another MAGA move, another show of cheaters supreme and above else a definition that comes from the UK that expresses these attitudes really well – dangerous corrupt gangsters.
Carlos: I have heard that this (rotten) move by Danielle Smith and the UCP was done coincidentally after Hungarian voters finally punted Viktor Orban, after he held power there for sixteen years. This was also delayed by two years, so it favours the UCP’s re-election in 2027, by cheating, of course. That’s exactly what this is. One thing is for certain is that the courts will have a field day with this, because it violates election and electoral regulations, as well as the Charter. Danielle Smith certainly is aware that the UCP could lose the next provincial election in Alberta, because there is dissatisfaction with her and the UCP from enough people, so she has to find a way to get around that, regardless of how illegal it is. Personally, I think the UCP should be sent to the United States, and should never be allowed to return to Canada, because they love Donald Trump so much.
It’s galling, although not surprising (which is probably as appalling) that the Canadian partisan right clamour to board the same bandwagon, led by the same marching anthems, of the furthering-right still aspiring at the denouement end of its arc to affect a worldwide movement –or at least scramble to hitch onto the stragglers’ tin-can train clattering behind the larger, more widely known Tiki-torch bearers stamping around the guttering flame and orange tallow streaming down the sides of the Mount Donald F tRump Float like a narcoleptic volcano belching bigotry, xenophobia, and white supremacy. The question is, why do they do it when the neo-right movement is so plainly in its throes?
I suppose the answer depends on the level of delusion and parochial outlook an aspiring neo-right party occupies: is its hubris enough to believe it has a firm grasp of the situation and can wrestle the writhing yellow sidewinder away from approaching global disaster and forge ahead under the Stars and Stripes/Gadsden/Confederate Battle flags? Or is the slimy serpent still slipping through desperate but failing grip? Or has the snake silently slithered, rattle and all, through clenched, empty fists yet waving in faint hope?
We could put former Conservative premiers Blaine Higgs and Heather Stefanson (NB/Man, respectively) in the empty-handed category, he for adopting MAGA’s transphobic alarmism, she for her government’s position on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls that couldn’t be defended for its apparent racism. (Higgs lost his own seat, Liberal Susan Holt became NB’s 1st female premier; NDP Premier Wab Kinew is now the most popular premier in Canada.)
Those which still have a white-knuckled but slipping grip might include Scott Moe who has tempered his transphobic campaign rhetoric, probably because although his conservative Sask Party still has a majority, it did lose 20% of its caucus in the 2024 election while the NDP Loyalist Opposition doubled its number of seats, now 27 to Sask’s 34. One week previously the resurrected (from the early 1950s) BC Conservative Party nearly won its first modern election by campaigning on remarkably similar nonissues like transgendered sportspeople and patently goofy claims about climate-change and public vaccination “hoaxes”; but it has since turfed its first modern leader, hived-off MLAs to a new, more-radicalized party of the far-right, and slumped below struggling NDP Premier, David Eby (the BCC leadership race features every level of snake-handling grip, from hubristic confidence to panicked slippage, and even a few who seem to have let it go completely, rattler and all–we’ll see how it goes in May).
Pierre Poilievre would have us believe he’s in control of the snakehead even as it whips him around like a schoolboy riding an opened firehose. Like the strange case of Jekyll and Hyde, it appears his stool-softening elixir of moderated rhetoric is wearing off with increasing frequency and of course showing at inopportune times. A halfer always happens with categorization: PP is hard to place since it also appears his venomous Gadsden buddy is slipping through his cloying white-collar fingers. If we see one more all-caps speech balloon “DON’T TREAD ON ME!” issuing out from under another floor-crosser’s boot it’ll be a safer call that he’s closer to the rattle-end than the head-end.
It’s too soon to gage the buffoonery of Ontario’s D’ohFo in this regard so we look instead to the most outstanding diamondback-wrangler in Canada, by process of elimination (and probably unanimous decision), none other than Alberta’s premier Danielle Smith. She has her thumbs deeply hooked in the serpent’s eye-sockets and, remarkably, her UCP’s polling numbers appear to agree. More remarkable still is her blithe and always glib close-emulation of tRumpublican manoeuvres as it roils, coils, springs, snaps and squirms as it heads ever faster into its own game of throes. The electoral boundary issue is only the most recent example (of many): although there’s an easily recognizable reason for the UCP to poison the sanctity of nonpartisan riding boundary adjustment–Smith’s UCP has been such a terrible government it has to cheat to win incumbency–, one could as convincingly say she’s doing it for no other reason than the Orbange-Goo-Tanned One does it. Stetsons and Big Oil aside, she contrasts with PP, her fellow Albertan: even though copying tRump is a dangerous, Faustian bargain that isn’t working out for him, it somehow helps support her. (To be fair, naturally PP cannot espouse–or even have an affair with–secession, which is the most outstanding difference between them).
Be that as it may, Smith’s unabashed attempt to imprint Texas-like tRumpublican gerrymandering upon Canada vis-a-vis Alberta will be challenged in courts of law which process, we lament, is normally too slow to rule comprehensively on this issue before the UCP picks the fruits of their psephological perfidy. Injunction, therefore, must be sought. This is one case where copying the USA might be a good thing: about 90% of the many, many tRumpublican attempts to allow blatant gerrymandering or otherwise disrupt fair elections have been successfully foiled by court injunction and trial decisions.
It should be easy to do the same here since, along with all the solid reasons to preserve and protect impartial drawing of riding boundaries, Smith is evidently doing this because tRump does, a habit which conforms with the pattern of emulations which should impress any judge–even a dead one–that it is real and really a foolishly dangerous move; and because insofar’s her co-partisan-drawn map unfairly favours UCP candidates who demonstrably favour secession from Canada ( a process for which she has not yet initiated SCoC-required constitutional amendment), she arguably has her finger on the scale in terms of favouring separatists while obstructing federalists; and, finally, because, Smith has been justifiably characterized by her estrangement from the truth: as paraphrased from Bob Woodward’s assessment of tRump, Danielle Smith is a baldfaced liar.
I’m a loyal Canadian so I have to say, “sorry, it had to be said…”