Alberta Premier Danielle Smith's government plans to introduce a motion to create an MLA-controlled committee to redraw the province's electoral boundaries.AMBER BRACKEN/The Canadian Press
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s government has rejected an independent commission’s proposed changes to the province’s electoral map, fuelling accusations of gerrymandering.
Instead of adopting the commission’s work, the government gave notice Thursday that it intends to propose a motion to create a new committee, this one controlled by government MLAs, to oversee another effort to redraw the map.
This would upend Alberta’s long-standing way of updating the boundaries of its constituencies for provincial elections. The shift drew condemnation from the leader of the Alberta New Democratic Party, who said the ruling United Conservative Party’s attempt to seize control of the process was an assault on democracy.
The commission is the latest iteration of an electoral-boundaries-setting body that Alberta is required under provincial law to convene every eight to 10 years. It reviews the province’s electoral boundaries and proposes changes. The government mandates the number of constituencies the commissioners must incorporate into their map.
It’s a process designed to foster compromise and limit political influence.
The public dispute over the commission’s latest work began last month when it submitted, for the first time in its history, two very different maps.
One was supported by a majority of its members: the chair, tapped by the governing UCP, and two panelists selected by the NDP. It was produced after a year of work and public hearings.
Their map would eliminate two rural ridings to accommodate a population boom in Calgary and Edmonton, where they proposed additional seats.
The Alberta Opposition NDP calls the move a cynical backdoor scheme to rig the October, 2027 general election.
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The UCP dominates rural Alberta, while the NDP’s support is centred in Calgary and Edmonton.
The commission’s other two members, both tapped by the UCP, put forward a competing map and report. They proposed more than a dozen merged urban and rural ridings, diluting the power of the urban vote.
They defended it as “necessary to respond to demographic change, reduce polarization and reflect Alberta’s increasingly interconnected urban-rural landscape.”
The majority called this vision unconstitutional and illogical.
They said the minority members had proposed ridings in Calgary with sharp population differences, and they questioned whether the dissenters may have drawn boundaries in a way that would boost the UCP’s electoral prospects, a process known as gerrymandering.
“What might be the minority’s true motivation for this? Our friends south of the border may have a term for this type of redistricting,” the majority’s report says. Legislators in the United States have long warred over electoral maps, with gerrymandering emerging as a common political tool.
Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi accused the Premier of trying to manipulate the outcome of the next provincial election, tentatively scheduled for October, 2027.
“Not adopting the commission’s report is cheating. Not adopting the commission’s report is gerrymandering. And in fact, not adopting the report is a full-on assault on our democracy,” Mr. Nenshi said during Question Period on Thursday.
The government argued that even the commission’s majority yearned for a different outcome.
“It is with regret that we have had to remove two ridings from central and north central Alberta,” the majority report says. The majority said they believe they would have been able to “provide Albertans with more effective representation” if more seats were available.
The government in late 2024 brought forward a bill calling for 89 electoral divisions in the next election, up from 87. This will increase the size of the legislature by 2 per cent, although the population has exploded by 20 per cent since the last commission.
Alberta’s boundaries commission is handcuffed to the legislated seat count, unlike in Quebec and British Columbia, where similar panels have leeway to calculate how many electoral divisions would be appropriate.
Dallas Miller, the commission’s chair and a justice of the Court of King’s Bench, said in the report that should legislators disagree with the proposal to remove the two rural seats, the government should increase the number of electoral districts to 91 and restore the deleted constituencies.
“The rest of the province as we propose must be maintained to the extent possible,” his recommendation says, adding this could be accomplished through an all-party committee.
Mr. Miller made this recommendation on his own, rather than with the support of other panelists.
Ms. Smith dismissed the Opposition’s accusations of cheating, countering that the government’s plan is designed to “preserve representation in rural Alberta” and leans on the chair’s recommendation.
“They need to read the report and understand what the judge was not comfortable with,” she said. “He lamented losing rural ridings.”
The government’s proposed motion does not require the final map to reflect Mr. Miller’s vision.
Former Alberta Party leader Greg Clark served on the boundaries commission, thanks to a nod from the NDP.
“We don’t want elected officials drawing their own maps, so we give independent commissions that job,” he said in an interview.
The majority may have proposed a map with 91 constituencies, had that option been available, he said. But that would have required redistributing all the electoral divisions, rather than just reinstating the two deleted rural ridings.
Lisa Young, a political science professor at the University of Calgary, said the UCP is breaking norms, but it is too early to call the governing party electoral cheats.
“Is this a process that might lend itself to that? Yes,” she said.
Prof. Young said the boundaries commission itself broke with tradition when two members produced their own work.
“The idea of a unanimous report is essential to the credibility of the process.”
With reports from The Canadian Press