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).
Smaller party business
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).
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.
I have seen little evidence that federal and provincial elected officials understand this threat or take it seriously. It would probably require more heavy government regulation of the corporations that own the social media platforms and AI generators.
The failure of the Online News Act probably means the federal government has lost the ability to meaningfully regulate the tech giants that own the major social media platforms.
It seems clear that the federal government’s attempts to pressure social media companies like Meta to compensate mainstream media companies for the right to share links on their platforms has failed. Meta’s retaliatory banning of links to news websites on Facebook and Instagram has caused more harm than help in Canada.
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.
Alberta is barrelling towards a separation referendum and there’s no sign our leaders are taking the threat seriously
Albertans will soon be faced with a series of referendum questions ranging from limiting the access immigrants have to health care and education, abolishing the Canadian Senate, allowing the provincial government to appoint federal court judges, and the big one — separation from Canada.
These questions, which are expected to be put to Alberta voters on October 19, 2026, are already accompanied by a storm of misinformation and disinformation that is dominating many peoples main sources of information — their social media feeds.
Misinformation is false or inaccurate information that is shared without harmful intent. Disinformation is deliberately shared false information that is intended to deceive.
With the referendum questions in mind, I shared concerns in a recent episode of the Daveberta Podcast that it feels like there is a real lack of urgency from our elected leaders about the level of misinformation and disinformation being spread and targeting Albertans from at home and abroad on social media.
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Challenging Danielle Smith at the Legislature to meeting King Charles III in London. It was a big week.
This is the second in a series of Daveberta Podcast episodes I’m calling Daveberta In Session. In these short episodes I’m sharing a few key things that I’m watching in Alberta politics in the week ahead and some other things that have caught my attention.
In this week’s episode, I discuss:
This full episode of this podcast is available to paid subscribers of the Daveberta Substack, so be sure to sign up for a monthly or annual subscription at Daveberta.substack.com/subscribe.
Thanks for subscribing and listening to this episode of the Daveberta Podcast. Share your feedback in the comments and if you enjoyed the podcast feel free to share it with a friend.
Dale Aalbers, son of Lloydminster Mayor Gerald Aalbers, running for UCP nomination in Vermilion-Lloydminster-Wainwright
The Alberta NDP were the first out of the gate preparing their slate for the next election when five candidates were nominated last week, and it looks like the United Conservative Party is not far behind.
At least three prospective candidates have announced their plans to seek UCP nominations to run in the next provincial election.
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The Daveberta Podcast is back In Session
You’ve probably noticed I haven’t recorded an episode of the Daveberta Podcast in a while — so if you were missing listening to it, please know that I was missing recording it.
Starting today and over the next few weeks I’m going to record a series of short episodes in which I will share a few key things that I’m watching in Alberta politics in the week ahead and some other things that have caught my attention.
I decided to test this podcast series — which I’m calling Daveberta In Session — during the spring session of the Alberta Legislature. I’m planning to do this for eight or nine weeks until mid May when the Assembly breaks for the summer months — and then we’ll see where we go from there.
In this week’s episode, I discuss:
