‘This Is Just a Plan to Cheat, Pure and Simple’

Alberta’s United Conservative Party government served notice in the legislature Thursday it intends to toss out the entire report of the 2025-26 Electoral Boundaries Commission.

Instead, the motion would spike the commission’s recommendation and hand the job off to a special MLA committee that 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 has 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 NDP’s vote. The thin edge of the slice would reach into urban areas, where the NDP is stronger, with the riding’s design ensuring they would be outnumbered by rural voters.

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 — as much as possible given the limit of 89 seats imposed on the non-partisan commission by the government — that 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 Thursday, Premier Smith claimed the majority of the commission’s members wanted to raise the number of seats in the legislature from 87 to 91. As is often the case with things 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 legislature Thursday, “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, its 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.