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.
Every day is a new round of chaos in Alberta politics
The United Conservative Party government surprised the opposition, political watchers, and probably a few of their own MLAs with plans to introduce a motion in the Legislature to scrap the final report of the bipartisan Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission and replace it with an MLA committee and advisory panel tasked with redrawing riding boundaries ahead of the next provincial election.
The motion placed on the Order Paper by UCP Government House Leader Joseph Schow would create a Special Select Committee on Electoral Boundaries, composed of Leduc-Beaumont UCP MLA Brandon Lunty as chairperson and 3 UCP MLAs and 2 NDP MLAs. The MLA committee would oversee a new advisory panel that would include a government-appointed chairperson, two UCP-appointees and two NDP-appointees.
The government’s motion to create an entirely new process to draw the next electoral map comes soon after the boundaries commission, which is made up of a government-appointed chairperson, two UCP-nominated commissioners and two NDP-nominated commissioners, submitted its own final report to Legislative Assembly Speaker Ric McIver.
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).
Elan Harper defeated Kelly Hopper to win the Conservative Party of Canada candidate nomination in Calgary Confederation.
Smaller party business
Fifty days ago Edmonton Riverbend MP Matt Jeneroux crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals. Jeneroux’s defection wasn’t unexpected, it had been rumoured for months, but a late 2025 statement that he planned to resign in 2026 led many people to believe there would be a by-election in Edmonton Riverbend.
Edmontonians won’t get the chance to vote in a federal by-election this spring, but had Jeneroux resigned we would have had an opportunity to test the long list of recent polls that show support for Carney’s Liberals increasing in Alberta. It wouldn’t have been much a test in most Alberta ridings, as Pierre Poilievre’s Battle River-Crowfoot by-election win demonstrated, but Riverbend is a different matter.
“Our country is not perfect, but it’s the best place in the world, and Albertans are ready to fight for Canada,” Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi said as he launched his party’s For Alberta For Canada campaign in anticipation of an expected referendum on Alberta’s separation from Canada.
“Every day, Albertans ask me one simple question about separatism: ‘what can I do?’ This new campaign is an answer to that—giving everyday people the tools and the power they need to stand up for our country.
They know that if Alberta separates, we’ll lose so much. Even the threat of a referendum is already damaging our economy and creating chaos and uncertainty. Today we are giving Albertans the tools to take action and be ready for this fall.”
The NDP campaign will kick off with a province-wide door-knocking day of action on April 25, which Nenshi says aims to attract pro-Canadian Albertans beyond NDP voters.
“We’re not repeating the mistake of the people who thought Brexit would never pass. We’re getting out there now,” Nenshi told reporters. “We’re not sleepwalking into this.”
Divided boundaries commission gives us a level-headed majority report and drastically different minority report
The final report of the bi-partisan Electoral Boundaries Commission usually settles where the lines are drawn on Alberta’s electoral map, but like most decisions in Alberta politics these days — an injection of polarization and partisanship threatens to tear apart a system that has worked pretty well for the past thirty years.
Alberta is getting a new electoral map for the next provincial election that increases the total number of ridings from 87 to 89 but what that map looks like will depend on what MLAs decide to do when the United Conservative Party government introduces the next version of the Electoral Divisions Act into the Legislature.
With duelling maps included in the final report, it’s unclear what the government’s bill will include and how active MLAs will be in redrawing the map themselves.
A fairly level-headed majority report was supported by government-appointed chair Dallas K. Miller (a retired Judge of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta) and NDP-appointed commissioners Greg Clark (former Alberta Party MLA for Calgary-Elbow and former UCP-appointed chair of the Alberta Balancing Pool) and Susan Samson (former mayor of the Town of Sylvan Lake).
A drastically different and much more controversial minority report was supported by UCP-appointed commissioners John Evans (a Lethbridge-based lawyer) and Julian Martin (a Professor Emeritus from the University of Alberta and former federal Conservative government senior staffer).
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.
A coalition of farmers and Indigenous leaders from northeast Alberta have formed a coalition called No CO2 Pipelines to oppose the construction of a pipeline that could run from Fort McMurray and other areas to carbon capture storage areas near Cold Lake.
The coalition is concerned about the safety of the proposed 600-kilometre carbon capture pipeline and 18,000 km² underground carbon storage project that will cross near dozens of rural and Indigenous communities. The planned project would be the world’s largest carbon capture and storage network.
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This is the third in a series of Daveberta Podcast episodes I’m calling Daveberta In Session. In these short episodes available to paid subscribers, I’ll sharing a few key things that I’m watching in Alberta politics this week and some other things that have caught my attention.
In today’s Daveberta Podcast episode, I discuss:
I decided to test this podcast series during the spring session of the Alberta Legislature. I’m planning to do this for most weeks until the Assembly breaks for the summer — and then we’ll see where we go from there.
Thank you for subscribing and listening to this episode of the Daveberta Podcast. A sincere thank you to new paid subscribers, Selena, Megan, Sandeep, and Nate.
Share your feedback in the comments and if you enjoyed the podcast feel free to share it with a friend.
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.
