There's no road map for where Alberta's riding boundary controversy is headed next

On tues dark, hours after the UCP-led legislative body set the groundwork for what the NDP and some experts warn will be a gerrymandered riding map, the citizens of Virginia showed how deeply ingrained partisan map-drawing has become south of the border.

In a ballot measure, the eastern U.S. State’s voters narrowly decided that a bipartisan redistricting commission should be sidelined, and politicians should be allowed to redraw Virginia’s congressional district map. The state is currently represented federally by six Democrats and five Republicans, but the Democrat-controlled state house would radically contort the map so that its party would be favoured in 10 seats, leaving only one to lean Republican red.

Why did voters agree to such blatant politicking? Commentators suggest it’s to tilt the scales against efforts by U.S. President Trump and Republicans to rejig maps in states like Texas and Missouri to create a Republican edge in the battle to control Congress.

The gerrymandering wars, it’s now known as.

The United Conservatives bristled at that old U.S. Term so much that this week they began protesting to the assembly Speaker when the NDP kept branding the UCP’s planned redistricting approach as “gerrymandering.”

Conservatives insist what they’re doing is nothing like the U.S.-style chicanery, and that they aren’t picking their boundaries or their voters.

But the Opposition and observers alike say what Alberta is now doing strays very, very far from the political convention that has long defined Canadian politics and kept the accusations from flying north of the border.

A provincial legislature doesn’t ordinarily reject a boundary commission’s recommended map, change the denominator from 89 to 91 seats at this late stage in the game, and set in place a new process without public hearings. But that’s what’s happened in Alberta, and that’s why the Alberta NDP have commissioned a roving truck billboard that says “Danielle Smith trying to rig the next election.”

The end result of this complicated, unorthodox semi-do-over of Alberta’s riding boundaries may not be a distorted gerrymander. But that possibility appears to be on the table like it’s seldom been in modern-day Canada.

The United Conservatives, who politically dominate in rural Alberta, bemoan that in the electoral boundary commission’s 89-riding map (up from the current 87), two rural ridings would be chopped, in favour of four new seats that reflect population growth in Edmonton and greater Calgary.

UCP members argued in debate that even some New Democrat MLAs and commissioners had bemoaned that more seats weren’t being added for the next election. Which is true, but the NDP retorted that the UCP had the opportunity to bump the seat count to 91 or higher when they first set in motion the boundary revamp in 2024 — or after the interim maps came out last fall — rather than after the commissioners’ final report came out and suggested the loss of two typically solid UCP ridings, based on where population grew and where it didn’t.

This idea to strike a special MLA committee to create a new 91-seat map came not from UCP backrooms, but from the boundary commission’s chair, Court of King’s Bench Justice Dallas Miller. He pitched that this MLA committee be set up to modify the majority map report agreed to by Miller and the two NDP appointees to the commission — the official maps, in essence — and add two extra seats.

That was Miller’s compromise proposal, and one he made alone. It came out of concern the government caucus would reject the official report and opt instead for the unprecedented minority maps that UCP appointees Julian Martin and John Evans devised, which spliced slivers of suburban Calgary with outlying areas and divided Red Deer and Lethbridge each into four rural-dominated districts.

Miller called it unconstitutional and unfair, and likened it to American map re-drawing.

Using data from Elections Alberta, they transposed the votes from the last general election onto both sets of proposed boundaries.

Under the majority report boundaries, the UCP would have won a majority with 48 seats, one less than they actually won in 2023. Under the minority report boundaries, the UCP could have won as many as 56 seats — including many in Calgary — some of them with extremely tight margins. That would mean a 23-seat victory over the NDP.

Small wonder it had NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi fuming.

But there had been UCP MLAs and past candidates recommending such urban-rural hybrid ridings, according to the submissions and testimony at the commission. Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides had pitched adding the rural hamlet of Springbank into his Calgary-Bow seat, while southern ministers Nathan Neudorf, Joseph Schow and Grant Hunter advocated Lethbridge’s two city seats becoming four ruralized ones.

The majority report rejected these ideas, but the minority included them. Will the new committee’s redesign bring them back? 

By giving the government a Door Number 3 between the majority and minority reports, Justice Miller was a “bit too clever and laid the foundation for Danielle Smith’s gerrymander,” according to one veteran scholar and analyst of boundaries. 

“He tried to hedge his bets but only made a bad situation (the existence of the minority report) far worse by casting doubt on the majority report,” James Bowden wrote on his blog, Parliamentum.

Bowden has written books and journal articles on riding revisions, and was a senior analyst at Elections Alberta’s electoral redistribution directorate. He repeatedly suggests Smith is gerrymandering for her political advantage.

“Danielle Smith’s government has now ruthlessly exploited the idea that Justice Miller planted in their minds,” Bowden wrote.

Smith has blown by political norms elsewhere, becoming the first Alberta premier to repeatedly use the notwithstanding clause, using legislation to nullify a court challenge to the referendum that separatists are pursuing, and even passing a law to make sure a former minister couldn’t name his fledgling party “Progressive Conservative.”

However, she has suggested that the end result her MLAs will steer toward resembles the majority maps more than the minority ones. The direction for this new panel, and the commission-like advisory group that will do the actual map revisions, includes some qualifiers from Miller on avoiding major surgery to ridings in Edmonton or southern Alberta.

“The recommendation is very clear about what the judge thinks should be preserved out of the majority report and where he thinks there can be some modification,” Smith said this week.

And in question period last week, the premier chided that Nenshi “wrote his questions and talking points thinking that we were proposing the minority report. We are not.”

There may be little clarity on what the final maps look like until November, when this UCP-led committee and its advisory group report back.

But one safe bet is that more Albertans will be more closely watching the outcome of this unorthodox process than normal. These will be the election maps not only for the 2027 provincial election, but at least one more after that; this change will last roughly a decade.

Boundary redrawing, in Alberta and throughout Canada, is normally the domain of politicos and wonks, and barely controversial.

Not this time. Not in the current iteration of Alberta.

Producer and writer

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