Tag: Alberta Chief Electoral Officer

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Alberta Politics

New Alberta electoral map slices up Lethbridge like a pizza

Minister of Affordability and Utilities Nathan Neudorf speaks at a government press conference in Edmonton on April 10, 2025 (source: Alberta Government / Flickr)
Minister of Affordability and Utilities Nathan Neudorf speaks at a government press conference in Edmonton on April 10, 2025 (source: Alberta Government / Flickr)

The most egregious change is how the O’Ferrall map indulge UCP cabinet minister Nathan Neudorf’s dream of carving up Lethbridge into massive “hybrid” rural-urban ridings.

Neudorf argued in his submission to the boundaries commission in early 2025 that slicing the city into “three or four complementary ridings that create a cohesive agri-innovation corridor.” would give “producers, processors, researches, and urban businesses a unified voice in the Legislature.”

The O’Ferrall map agreed with Neudorf’s argument and its final report used similar language, though it recommended leaving a single urban riding in the city’s centre. That will result in the number of electorally competitive ridings in the southwest Alberta city dropping from two to one. The creation of the three large hybrid rural-urban ridings and appears to be designed to isolate the NDP to one riding in the region.

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Alberta Politics

Defensive, hostile and sloppy: Alberta’s new electoral maps not a gerrymandering nightmare but not great

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith

How would the UCP react if the NDP did this? Spoiler: Not well.

The process of redistributing Alberta’s electoral boundaries is normally a fairly boring administrative process but, like most things in Alberta politics these days, nothing is spared from political drama. The chaos machine chugs along.

The new maps proposed by an Advisory Panel to the Special Select Committee on Electoral Boundaries were tabled in the Legislature last week, with no shortage of controversy. These maps replaced the maps proposed by the bipartisan Electoral Boundaries Commission that were tossed aside by Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party government more than six months ago.

The Advisory Panel’s map aren’t the gerrymandering nightmare scenario that were proposed by the UCP minority on the boundaries commission earlier this year but these new maps come with their own set of problems. The biggest problem is that the government was so eager to intervene in what should be an arms-length process.

Unlike the last three decades of bipartisan boundaries commissions, which have been conducted with public hearings, public feedback and public transcripts, the Advisory Panel chaired by retired judge and UCP donor Brian O’Ferrall drew its map in private without any public input or feedback.

The Advisory Panel report included a map supported by O’Ferrall and the UCP appointed panelists, former Conservative MP Monte Solberg and emergency management strategist Darwin Durnie, and a minority opinion supported by the two NDP appointees, University of Alberta Law professor Gerard Kennedy and former Okotoks town councillor Brent Robinson (for the purpose of this column, I’m going to refer to the UCP-supported Advisory Panel map as the O’Ferrall map).

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Alberta Politics

Drawing the line on gerrymandering in Alberta

Premier Danielle Smith chats with Postmedia columnist Rick Bell during a session at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Calgary in October 2026 (source: Danielle Smith / Facebook)
Premier Danielle Smith chats with Postmedia columnist Rick Bell during a session at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Calgary in October 2026 (source: Danielle Smith / Facebook)

Chief Elections Officer says he won’t have time to implement the new maps ahead of the October 2027 election

Less than two weeks after the referendums that dominated Alberta politics for months, Chief Elections Officer Gordon McClure is warning that his office won’t have the time or resources to implement the new electoral maps before the October 18, 2027 provincial election. The new maps were submitted by an advisory panel to an MLA committee last week and will be tabled in the Legislature on Monday, November 2.

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Alberta Politics

UCP electoral boundaries committee names former judge and UCP-donor as advisory panel chair

Retired judge Brian O’Ferrall, KC has been appointed as the chair of the independent advisory panel that will redo the work already done by the bipartisan Electoral Boundaries Commission last year.

The two NDP MLA’s on the committee, Calgary-Mountain View MLA Kathleen Ganley and Edmonton-Mill Woods MA Christina Gray, took issue with O’Ferrall’s financial support of the UCP since retiring as a judge:

“In a process that is already regarded by the public as illegitimate, this clear partisan leaning does nothing to restore legitimacy. Instead, it continues to show that this is about the UCP drawing a partisan map.”

According to Elections Alberta records, O’Ferrall donated $500 to the Calgary-Elbow UCP constituency association in 2022, $1,000.00 to the UCP in 2024 and $1,287.50 in 2025. Elections Canada records show that he donated $6,850 to the Conservative Party of Canada in 2023 and 2024.

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Alberta Politics

Alberta NDP’s path to victory still goes through Calgary

Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley and former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi (source: Rachel Notley / Twitter)
Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley and former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi (source: Rachel Notley / Twitter)

Alberta NDP supporters are fond of saying their party would have won enough seats to form government if a few thousand votes had shifted their way in Calgary on May 29, 2023.

Putting aside that’s basically the same as saying “we would have won if more people voted for us,” it does reinforce just how big of a role that city’s voters played in the last provincial election — and how much they will matter again when Albertans go to the polls in 2027.

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Alberta Politics

Alberta is on a collision course with a dangerous political storm

Alberta is on a collision course with a dangerous political storm
Alberta is on a collision course with a dangerous political storm

We are now 18 months away from the next scheduled provincial election in October 2027 and we don’t know what the electoral map is going to look like (we’ll find out by November 2026). We don’t even know what our political environment might resemble by that time.

Albertans are being forced on a collision course with a political storm unlike anything anyone who’s involved in provincial politics has seen in their lifetimes.

A referendum on Alberta’s separation from Canada is expected to happen in October 2026 along with at least 9 questions proposed by Premier Smith ranging from abolishing the Senate to limiting access immigrants have to health care and education (Smith is expected to make an announcement about these on April 23). And there might even be a question about banning coal mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

Some of these incredibly divisive referendum questions have the potential to dramatically reshape and divide communities and politics in Alberta in ways we haven’t seen in generations — especially with the threat of foreign interference and misinformation promoting Alberta becoming the 51st State.

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Alberta Politics

The last Alberta election was pretty darn close

UCP leader Danielle Smith on election night in Calgary (source: Danielle Smith / Facebook)
UCP leader Danielle Smith on election night in Calgary (source: Danielle Smith / Facebook)

Alberta has a well-earned reputation as the land of historically large majority governments because every election since 1905 has resulted in a majority government — some of them huge. But the results of the last provincial election were pretty darn close in comparison.

The province-wide vote put Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party ahead of Rachel Notley’s NDP by 8 points, but that margin is deceiving. The UCP’s province-wide lead was largely a result of the party’s huge margins of victory in rural and small city ridings outside of Calgary and Edmonton. The vote results in that election’s twenty closest races — fifteen which were located in Calgary — were much, much closer.

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Alberta Politics

Worried about gerrymandering? Pay attention to the closest races from Alberta’s 2023 election

A map of the ridings with the closest races won by the UCP (blue) and NDP (orange) in the 2023 Alberta provincial election (map tool: CanadianPolling.ca)
A map of the ridings with the closest races won by the UCP (blue) and NDP (orange) in the 2023 Alberta provincial election (map tool: CanadianPolling.ca)

The United Conservative Party government has moved to take greater control of how the electoral boundaries for Alberta’s next provincial election will be drawn. Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP government voted to toss out of majority report of the bipartisan Electoral Boundaries Commission this week and create a new process where an advisory panel reporting to an MLA committee will redraw Alberta’s new electoral map.

The Boundaries Commission report was disregarded by the government after the two UCP appointees to the commission released their own minority report that proposed drastically redrawing the proposed 89 ridings. It is difficult to look at the UCP commissioners proposal to slice the cities of Calgary, Lethbridge and Red Deer into huge rural-urban ridings without thinking it was proposed with the goal of cementing UCP majority government’s for the next decade.

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Alberta Politics

Five questions about the MLA committee drawing Alberta’s new electoral boundaries

1. Why is the government doing this?

The only reason for the UCP government to introduce this is that UCP MLAs didn’t like what the majority of the commissioners, including the government-appointed chairperson, recommended in the final report.

Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP caucus is dominated by rural MLAs and sweeping the ridings outside of Calgary and Edmonton is key to the UCP winning re-election in 2027. It’s very likely that UCP MLAs did not like the prospect of having to challenge each other for their party’s nominations in newly redrawn rural ridings ahead of the next election — a situation that would cause tension in any caucus. The addition of competitive urban seats in cities where the population has grown the fastest also risks slimming the UCP’s majority.

I’m willing to bet that’s the main reason why the UCP government has intervened to send the map back to the drawing board.

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Alberta Politics

Get ready for a big fight over Alberta’s separation referendum

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Justice Minister Mickey Amery in April 2025 announcing changes to Alberta’s citizen initiative referendums (Photo: Government of Alberta/Flickr).
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Justice Minister Mickey Amery in April 2025 announcing changes to Alberta’s citizen initiative referendums (Photo: Government of Alberta/Flickr).

It’s going to be messy but the Chief Electoral Officer needs to hold his ground – and his independence.

Alberta’s Chief Electoral Officer was publicly rebuked by Premier Danielle Smith and Minister of Justice Mickey Amery after a petition aimed at triggering a province-wide referendum on Alberta’s separation from Canada was referred to the courts to determine if it is legal.

Chief Electoral Officer Gordon McClure announced earlier this week that a citizen initiative petition request submitted by separatist Alberta Prosperity Project CEO Mitch Sylvestre was being referred to the Court of King’s Bench to determine whether it conforms with the requirements of sections 2 (4) of the Citizen Initiative Act. That section specifically states that “an initiative petition proposal must not contravene sections 1 to 35.1 of the Constitution Act, 1982.”

Smith and Amery took to social media to call on McClure to withdraw the court reference and allow the Alberta separation petition to move forward.

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