Elan Harper defeated Kelly Hopper to win the Conservative Party of Canada candidate nomination in Calgary Confederation.
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.
Kelly Hopper is challenging Elan Harper for the federal Conservative Party nomination in Calgary Confederation.
Hopper ran for the Conservative nomination in the neighbouring Calgary Signal Hill in 2024 and her website says former UCP MLA and 2025 candidate Jeremy Nixon asked her to enter this race.
Nixon was the UCP MLA for Calgary-Klein from 2019 to 2023, and was defeated in Calgary Confederation by Liberal Corey Hogan in the 2025 federal election.
It has been a big year in Alberta politics and a big year for Daveberta. Canada had a federal election, there was no shortage of news and (frequently troubling) political maneuvering in Alberta, Calgary and Edmonton elected new mayors, and I marked 20 years since launching my original blog and starting to write about Alberta politics online.
I’m taking it easy this week to enjoy the Christmas break with my family and friends but I did take a few moments to look at some of the top columns I published this year and wanted to share that list with you today.
Using Substack’s metrics, which combine traffic, likes and subscriptions generated, here are the top 10 columns I published in 2025.
Independent Bonnie Critchley finishes a distant but respectable second
As was widely expected, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre had no problem winning yesterday’s federal by-election in the Conservative stronghold of Battle River—Crowfoot. Poilievre’s commanding lead was clear the moment the first poll was reported shortly after 8:30 p.m., which showed the party leader with 437 votes compared to a combined 49 votes for all the other candidates in the race.
After a long night of counting the write-in ballots, Elections Canada reported that Poilievre was elected with 40,548 votes — 80.4 percent of the total votes cast in the by-election. Poilievre’s landslide win is fell just short of the 82.8 percent earned by former and future MP Damien Kurek just a few months ago, but shows that Conservative Party support remains solid in this sprawling rural Alberta riding.
Pierre Poilievre is going to win. The only real question is: by how much?
Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre will return to the House of Commons after he wins the federal by-election happening in the sprawling rural riding of Battle River-Crowfoot on Monday, August 18.
The by-election marking Poilievre’s return to Ottawa also marks a return to Alberta after he left his hometown of Calgary more than 20 years ago to work as a political staffer in Ottawa and run in a riding just outside the capital city. After spending 21 years as an Ottawa-area MP, Poilievre was defeated by Liberal Bruce Fanjoy in Carleton on April 28, which many believe was a result of his strong support of the anti-vaccine trucker convoy that harassed residents of the capital city in January and February 2022.
It’s been just over three months since Election Day in Canada and, as the dust has settled, I’ve taken a closer look at the results in ridings across Alberta.
The Conservative Party continued its decades-long streak of electoral dominance in federal elections in Alberta as it saw its support jump to 63.5 percent from 55.4 percent in 2021 (though it is still lower than the 69 percent the Conservatives earned in Alberta in 2019). The Conservatives had strong showings in every part of the province, but especially in rural Alberta where the party’s candidates were elected with huge margins of victory.
Alberta’s two largest cities, Calgary and Edmonton, were home to the most interesting and most competitive races of the federal election in our province. The races with the narrowest margins of victory were in the cities, and the three closest races were in Calgary, which not long ago was considered a Conservative stronghold.
A Liberal win in this sprawling rural riding would be one in a trillion
With Stampede season soon winding down in Calgary, attention of the political class will quickly turn from the lobbyist receptions, pancake flips, and oil industry cocktail parties to the land of real cowboys. The federal by-election in Battle River-Crowfoot has been called for August 18 and Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre is the favourite to win this vote and reclaim a seat in the House of Commons after his defeat in Ontario on April 28.
It’s Election Day so don’t forget to vote!
It’s Election Day in Canada and the polls are open from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. in Alberta. If you aren’t one of the 815,131 Albertans who voted in the Advance Polls, then be sure to find your voting station and cast a ballot today.
While voters in most of Alberta’s 37 federal electoral districts are expected to elect their local Conservative Party candidate tonight, there are a few ridings that are expected to be competitive. Here are a few Alberta ridings I will be watching closely tonight…
The Liberal surge in the national polls, which shows the Liberals jumping up to around 30 percent support in Alberta in some polls (the party’s highest levels of support in this province in almost sixty years), has led to a lot of discussion in this campaign about vote-splitting.
“Stop the Split!” was the key message of a recent pamphlet that Blake Desjarlais’ campaign mailed to voters in the riding. The NDP campaign’s message is “Only Blake Desjarlais can defeat Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in Edmonton Griesbach.” The pamphlet doesn’t mention Kerry Diotte, which is interesting, and points out that in the last election the NDP earned 40 percent of the vote, the Conservatives won 37 percent and the Liberals finished third with 13 percent in the riding.
Discussions about vote-splitting in Edmonton, which usually revolve around defeating Conservative candidates, almost always devolve into cringeworthy arguments between Liberal and NDP partisans – which is why I try to avoid them.
Daveberta readers are smart people and it’s not my place to tell you how to vote. The furthest I’ll wade into the vote-splitting debate in my riding today is to say that it’s true that the Liberals are doing very well in the national polls and it’s also true that Desjarlais’ campaign is the better organized of the two main non-Conservative candidates in Edmonton Griesbach.
NDP MP Blake Desjarlais faces former Conservative MP Kerry Diotte and Mark Carney’s red wave
As Canada’s federal election enters its final week, I am taking a closer look at the race in the Edmonton Griesbach riding. It’s one of a surprisingly large handful of Alberta ridings that are considered competitive in this election and it also happens to be the riding I live and vote in.
The east central/north side Edmonton riding was where the NDP picked up their second seat in Alberta in the 2021 federal election when New Democrat Blake Desjarlais defeated two-term Conservative MP Kerry Diotte. This year’s election is a rematch between the two candidates but, despite traditionally being a blue-orange race, the Liberal Party’s surge could put that party’s candidate in the mix.
Liberals drop former NDP MLA Rod Loyola in Edmonton Gateway
Canada’s federal election is in full-swing and today’s Daveberta newsletter includes a quick update about candidate nominations in Alberta. I will be back early next week with a regular column and more analysis from Alberta in the federal election.
As of this morning, the Conservative Party, the New Democratic Party, and the Green Party are the only parties with candidates in all 37 ridings in Alberta. The Liberal Party briefly had a full slate but are down one after their candidate in Edmonton Gateway was removed yesterday (more about that below).
The deadline for parties to nominate candidates or for Independent candidates to put their names forward is Monday, April 7 at 2:00 p.m.
UCP MLA writes that Canada is broken and Team Canada is a “fake team”
Mark Carney has only been Prime Minister of Canada for 17 days but last week he may have made one of the most consequential statements by a Canadian political leader in recent memory.
“The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” Carney said in response to American President Donald Trump’s almost daily threats against Canada.
Trump backed down on his threats last week to level 25 percent tariffs against the Canadian automobile manufacturing industry, probably temporarily, after Carney announced retaliatory tariffs, but this week could feature Trump’s next big intervention in a federal election campaign where he has become the biggest villain. April 2 is what the Trump is calling “Liberation Day.” It’s the day he says he plans to level more huge tariffs on products being imported into the US.
Rod Loyola has resigned as the Alberta NDP MLA for Edmonton-Ellerslie and is running as the Liberal Party candidate in the new Edmonton Gateway riding in the federal election. Loyola represented his south Edmonton provincial riding from 2015 until he stepped down earlier this week to pursue the federal Liberal nomination.
Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre grew up in Alberta. That’s a big deal for our province.
The political landscape in Canada has totally shifted under the weight of American President Donald Trump’s threats to impose harsh tariffs on Canadian goods and annex Canada as the 51st State.
Trump’s daily rambling threats against his country’s northern neighbours, mixed with the departure of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from Canadian politics, has erased the huge lead in the polls that Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre had been riding for the past year.
The swearing-in of former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney as Canada’s new Prime Minister appears to have brought the Liberal Party back into the electoral game, for now, but such huge swings in public opinion in such a short time mean it could be impossible to predict what will happen next.
