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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).

Read all about it on the Daveberta Substack

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