Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in the chamber after the throne speech in Edmonton in October, 2025.AMBER BRACKEN/The Canadian Press
Tim Querengesser is a journalist and writer in Edmonton.
In 1964, Ottawa passed the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act to prevent gerrymandering, shifting the work of electoral mapmaking from parliamentarians to independent commissions. The provinces largely followed suit.
Fast-forward to today, however, and some provinces are working to jettison or restrict independent commissions. That means partisan gerrymandering could re-enter the chat. But what’s less obvious is that the people who stand to lose the most live in cities.
In Alberta, Premier Danielle Smith recently tossed the work of an independent and bipartisan electoral boundaries commission after its recommendation was to consolidate rural seats and add urban ones. Ms. Smith’s United Conservative Party government – which won its 2023 majority with a near sweep of rural ridings while winning just 12 ridings in Calgary, and zero in Edmonton – has instead formed a legislative committee stacked with its own MLAs to oversee a panel that will delineate the boundaries for Alberta’s next election, scheduled in just 18 months.
In plainer terms, Ms. Smith will be involved in drawing the map.
Alberta rejects commission’s proposed changes to province’s electoral map
In Quebec, it took a lawsuit to force a rethink on such meddling. In 2023, a preliminary report from Quebec’s independent commission suggested the province remove ridings near Montreal and the Gaspé Peninsula and add two in growing suburban areas.
Premier François Legault’s CAQ government (and several other parties) worried cutting ridings would weaken regional representation, and passed a law that paused the boundary commission’s new map. That meant Quebec’s forthcoming election in 2026 would have used boundaries created in 2017. A group of municipal officials sued, claiming the law effectively limited their citizens’ Charter-protected rights to vote.
In late April, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that Quebec’s law suspending the map did indeed violate the Charter.
In response, Quebec has now tabled a bill to increase its ridings from 125 to 127. Doing so allows politicians to retain the ridings the commission would have eliminated, but also create the ones it suggested in the growing suburban areas.
Ontario was perhaps a template for Quebec. In 2024, Premier Doug Ford told reporters the 2025 election would be contested using electoral boundaries from 2018, rather than mirroring federal ridings created by independent commissions, as had been the province’s practice since the 1990s.
In 2005, however, Ontario decoupled Northern Ontario from mirroring federal ridings. There are now four more provincial seats in Northern Ontario than on the federal map. Southern Ontario ridings continued to follow the federal map, until Mr. Ford locked in the 2018 map, eschewing further changes.
He ultimately won a majority. And though analysts noted he would have won regardless of the map in play, voters in Ontario’s fastest-growing ridings – its cities – continue to lose power thanks to a map that’s frozen in the past.
Each example highlights how provincial gerrymandering is nearly uniformly about diminishing the power of urban voters in favour of rural ones.
Canada’s recent flirtation with gerrymandering is, admittedly, innocuous compared to the battles fought in the United States. Still, it’s a trend that can’t be ignored. Nor should it be, given its links to urban growth. On both counts, Alberta should be seen as the cautionary tale.
Recall that independent electoral commission: Before Ms. Smith tossed its work, the group made national headlines for featuring a second “minority” report from two of the five members of the panel, who just happened to be linked to the governing UCP. Susan Samson, a commissioner appointed by the Alberta New Democratic Party, told reporters that the minority report emerged late in commission’s work, and that she had little doubt that “something or someone” connected to the UCP had created it.
Such minority reports are weirdly normal in Alberta – they were part of its 2017, 2010, and 2003 boundary commission reports. What was new in 2026, though, is that the minority report came with magically well-prepared maps that delineated 14 new “rurban” ridings.
These sliced Edmonton, Calgary, and other cities up like pizzas to allow shrinking rural areas that surround them to be glued on.
Many saw this as a naked attempt to keep rural conservative voters powerful in a province that has added nearly 700,000 people since 2021, with the vast majority of those people settling in cities.
Alberta’s next election should serve as Canada’s warning on gerrymandering. We should remember that we already solved this: Independent, bipartisan electoral boundary commissions should be left to do their work. Provincial governments should accept their recommendations or face electoral consequences. And the preservation of rural voices should not come at the expense of urban ridings, the fastest growing in the country.
Give the maps back.