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.
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.
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.
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.
Jackie Tomayer is the third candidate to enter the United Conservative Party nomination contest in the Vermilion-Lloydminster-Wainwright riding. Tomayer is President of the Lloydminster Chamber of Commerce, a director of the Alberta Association of Agricultural Societies, and General Manager of the Lloydminster Agricultural Exhibition Association.
Other candidates in the race include Stacy Miskew and political staffer Dale Aalbers (the son of Lloydminster Mayor Gerald Aalbers).
Two contests to choose UCP candidates for the next provincial have begun to heat up:
Calgary-Shaw by-election watch: Well-known conservative organizer Craig Chandler launched a website to pressure City Councillor Dan McLean not to run for the UCP nomination in Calgary-Shaw. Chandler is believed to be supporting nomination candidate Mike Derry in the race to replace UCP MLA Rebecca Schulz, who is expected to resign from the Legislature in May 2026.
McLean said he has not decided if he’s going to enter the nomination race.
But the threat is on the radar of some municipal elected officials in Edmonton.
The City of Edmonton’s 2025 Corporate Strategic Risks analysis identified misinformation and disinformation and the adverse impact of artificial intelligence as “risks that can shift public opinion and erode trust in authority.”
Edmonton City Councillor Michael Janz referred to the volume of online misinformation and disinformation on social media as “manufactured rage-baiting” when asked about it after last fall’s municipal elections in Edmonton.
“I think this actually represents a bigger question of how much of what we saw was manufactured rage-baiting,” Janz told Edmonton Journal reporter Eric Bowling in October 2025. “I think we have a real problem with misinformation being spread through social media posts.”
Social media platforms and the echo-chambers their algorithms create not only amplify controversial and divisive topics but they can distort and corrupt the information environment.
Misinformation and disinformation isn’t new, but the speed it can travel and audience it can reach has exploded through social media platforms.
There is a flood of misinformation and disinformation about Alberta’s separation from Canada, commonly found in the form of social media influencers and Artificial Intelligence-generated videos, images and charts, pouring into social media feeds. It’s unclear who runs many of these anonymous social media accounts that publish this AI-generated content or where in the world they are posting from.
It has never been easier for malicious actors at home and aboard to interfere and attempt to destabilize our politics and society — and the deeply divisive issue of separation and the increasingly troubling divided opinions about immigration — are easy targets.
Early March candidate meetings scheduled in Calgary and Edmonton ridings
With rumours of an early provincial election circulating since last year, the Alberta NDP looks like it will be the first political party out of the gate to nominate candidates ahead of the next vote.
The NDP website lists candidate nomination meetings scheduled in Edmonton-Glenora on March 3, Calgary-Elbow on March 4, Calgary-Klein on March 5, Edmonton-Beverly-Clareview on March 6 and Calgary-Edgemont on March 7.
All five of these ridings are represented by NDP MLAs who will be seeking re-election if they secure their party’s nominations.
Longtime Daveberta readers will know that I am keenly interested in tracking candidate nominations ahead of provincial and federal elections in Alberta, so I am pleased to share with you that I am continuing this tradition as we approach the next election.
After months of speculation, Premier Danielle Smith said during her 2025 year-end interviews that she isn’t planning to call an early election in 2026, but anyone who pays attention to politics knows: circumstances change.
The next provincial general election is scheduled to happen in October 2027 but there continues to be wide speculation that an early election could be called — and there are plenty of reasons to believe why.
Smith’s UCP remains ahead of Naheed Nenshi’s Alberta NDP in the polls and the governing party continues to raise large amounts of donations. And there is little doubt that Smith remains one of the most effective and shrewd political communicators in Alberta and in Canada’s conservative movement.
Alberta is getting a new electoral map and the commissioners tasked with the job of redrawing the province’s political boundaries released their interim report in October.
The Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission is now collecting input about the interim map before the commissioners go back to the drawing board to sketch out their final report, which will be submitted to Speaker Ric McIver by March 28, 2026.
The new map would be used for the next provincial election if it is approved by the Legislature and if a provincial election isn’t called next spring, as some political watchers suspect could happen.
Flashy new NDP ad gives a glimpse into what the NDP wants to fight for in the next election
Naheed Nenshi is ready. That’s the main message of a new campaign ad released by the Alberta New Democrats last week. The video reintroduces Nenshi to Albertans and tries to lay out some clear contrasts between his party and Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party.
The new ad is reportedly the result of the Alberta NDP’s new relationship with the US-based Fight Agency, the political consultants behind Zohran Mamdani’s wildly successful campaign to become the next Mayor of New York City. And it’s an impressive ad.
With the end of summer fast approaching and the Labour Day long-weekend just days away, I’ve opened up the mailbag to answer a few Alberta politics questions about health care privatization, early election speculation, and small nuclear reactors sent in by Daveberta subscribers. Read it all on the Daveberta Substack.
Politics in Alberta doesn’t skip a beat.
Less than a week after former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi won a landslide victory in the Alberta NDP leadership race, the United Conservative Party has launched a series of attack ads against him, framing the new NDP leader as “Justin Trudeau’s choice for Alberta” and “just another tax and spend Liberal.”
Nenshi’s team tossed out the old NDP playbook.
Instead of stumbling over fancy words and getting overly defensive (or even worse, ignoring the charge), Nenshi laughed off the attack and shot back with his own stinging criticism of Smith’s UCP.
