Retired judge Brian O’Ferrall, KC has been appointed as the chair of the independent advisory panel that will redo the work already done by the bipartisan Electoral Boundaries Commission last year.
The two NDP MLA’s on the committee, Calgary-Mountain View MLA Kathleen Ganley and Edmonton-Mill Woods MA Christina Gray, took issue with O’Ferrall’s financial support of the UCP since retiring as a judge:
“In a process that is already regarded by the public as illegitimate, this clear partisan leaning does nothing to restore legitimacy. Instead, it continues to show that this is about the UCP drawing a partisan map.”
According to Elections Alberta records, O’Ferrall donated $500 to the Calgary-Elbow UCP constituency association in 2022, $1,000.00 to the UCP in 2024 and $1,287.50 in 2025. Elections Canada records show that he donated $6,850 to the Conservative Party of Canada in 2023 and 2024.
Danielle Smith’s Alberta separation referendum looms over party nominations for next election
MLA Kyle Kasawski was nominated to run for re-election in Sherwood Park by Alberta NDP members at a meeting last weekend in the large suburban hamlet east of Edmonton.
Kasawski currently serves as the opposition’s Affordability and Utilities critic role has been one of the strongest additions to the NDP opposition bench since 2023.
Leduc-Beaumont UCP MLA and and Special Citizen Initiative Proposal Review Committee chair Brandon Lunty (screenshot from assembly.ab.ca)
Trigger-happy UCP misfires with Mission Accomplished press release
Brandon Lunty looked like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin when he found out that the United Conservative Party Caucus sent out a press release announcing the adoption of a motion that hadn’t even been voted on yet.
As chair of the Special Citizen Initiative Proposal Review Committee, Leduc-Beaumont UCP MLA Lunty had one job today: to steer a motion through the committee to recommend the adoption of a referendum question on Alberta separation from Canada.
It should have been easy. The UCP has a 3-2 majority on the committee over the opposition NDP and Lunty controlled all the levers. The last minute scheduled hour and a half meeting that was only called on Monday should have given the UCP plenty of time to finish the task if only some poor staffer at the UCP Caucus hadn’t clicked send too early on the press release declaring it was a done deal.
Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley and former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi (source: Rachel Notley / Twitter)
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.
UCP leader Danielle Smith on election night in Calgary (source: Danielle Smith / Facebook)
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 ofthem 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.
A map of the ridings with the closest races won by the UCP (blue) and NDP (orange) in the 2023 Alberta provincial election (map tool: CanadianPolling.ca)
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.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith (source: Danielle Smith / Facebook)
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.
The Best of Alberta Politics 2025 Survey top nominees include MLAs Nate Glubish, Janis Irwin, Peter Guthrie, Danielle Smith, Naheed Nenshi, Sarah Hoffman, Brandon Lunty, Scott Sinclair, Rebecca Schulz, Brooks Arcand-Paul, Rakhi Pancholi, Rob Miyashiro, Chantelle de Jonge, and Marlin Schmidt. (source: Legislative Assembly of Alberta)
Voting is now open for this year’s best MLA, best cabinet minister, most effective opposition MLA, best public speaker, and more.
With hundreds of names submitted to the ninth annual Best of Alberta Politics Survey, your nominations have been sorted and the top choices have been identified in all nine categories.
Voting in the 2025 survey is now open to the nearly 8,000 Daveberta subscribers until Tuesday, December 2 at 8:00 p.m. The results will be announced on Thursday, December 4.
Minister of Affordability and Utilities Nathan Neudorf speaks at a government press conference in Edmonton on April 10, 2025 (source: Alberta Government / Flickr)
I read all 197 submissions to Alberta’s Electoral Boundaries Commission so you don’t have to
The City of Lethbridge could be carved into four provincial ridings that sprawl into the surrounding rural areas if a local United Conservative Party MLA gets his wish. Lethbridge-East MLA Nathan Neudorf submitted a written proposal to the Electoral Boundaries Commission calling for the southwest Alberta city to be reconfigured into “three or four complementary ridings that create a cohesive “agri-innovation corridor.”
Neudorf’s submission, which is one of 197 written submissions received by the commission and posted on its website, proposes a dramatic change in the electoral map he says would give “producers, processors, researches, and urban businesses a unified voice in the Legislature.”
Premier Danielle Smith and Conservative by-election candidate Pierre Poilievre (source: Danielle Smith / Instagram)
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.
UCP leader Danielle Smith with candidates Dale Nally (left) and Angela Wood (right) at a campaign event in St. Albert (source: Becca Polak / Twitter)
Before the collapse of the Progressive Conservative Party in 2015, being a PC Party member – or at least participating in PC Party events – was extremely normal. Normal to the point that it was barely political.
If you were a business or a non-profit that depended on government policy, you were a participator to some extent – you kind of had to be. As a decades-old political dynasty, it was the only game in town, and the political dynamic in Alberta showed it.
Jordan Peterson, 14, in the Edmonton Journal on March 14, 1977 (source: Paul Fairie on Twitter)
A controversial right-wing media personality with a huge online following will soon be entering the election fray.
Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson is making three speaking tour stops in the Alberta next week and will almost certainly provide fodder for local conservative media columnists to chew on.
With more than 1,300 votes cast, Lunty defeated lobbyist Heather Feldbusch, real estate agent Nam Kular, school trustee Dawn Miller, former MLA Dave Quest, and former school trustee Karen Richert to secure the UCP nomination in the mostly suburban riding south of Edmonton.
Cam Hennan (source: Cam Hennan / Twitter)
Lunty is an intergovernmental affairs policy coordinator with the Alberta government. He previously worked as a regional organizer for the Wildrose Party and was that party’s candidate in Calgary-South East in the 2015 election, where he placed third with 29 per cent of the vote. He attempted to win the UCP nomination in the Camrose riding ahead of the 2019 election but placed behind current MLA Jackie Lovely.
Rachel Notley at the Edmonton-Strathcona nomination rally (source: Rachel Notley / Facebook)
Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley was nominated as her party’s candidate in Edmonton-Strathcona this past weekend. Speaking to a crowd of more than 800 supporters gathered at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, Notley delivered an energetic speech that felt like a campaign kick-off for the former premier’s party.
Notley was first elected as MLA for the central Edmonton riding in 2008 and was re-elected in 2019 with 72.2 per cent of the vote. The riding has elected NDP MLAs since 1997 and the party previously held the riding from 1986 to 1993.
UCP choose Claresholm Mayor in ‘do-over’ nomination vote in Livingstone-Macleod
Claresholm Mayor Chelsae Petrovic and UCP leadership candidate Rebecca Schulz in 2022 (source: Chelsae Petrovic/Facebook)
Town of Claresholm Mayor Chelsae Petrovic won the United Conservative Party‘s ‘do-over’ nomination vote in Livingstone-Macleod. Petrovic defeated Tanya Clemens and Don Whalen in a decisive first ballot victory. Petrovic earned 759 votes with Clemens collecting 469 votes and Whalen finishing third with 118 votes.
This is the UCP’s second time holding a nomination vote in the southern Alberta riding.
Former People’s Party candidate Nadine Wellwood was the only candidate in a previous nomination race held in November 2022 after MLA Roger Reid withdrew the day after the entry deadline. Wellwood was then disqualified by the UCP provincial board of directors.
Crowsnest Pass Municipal Councillor Lisa Sygutekwrote about the nomination vote and what she describes as Take Back Alberta’s takeover of the local UCP constituency association.
The NDP have nominated well-known conservationist and author Kevin Van Tighem and Nanton town councillor Kevin Todd is running for the Alberta Party.
Bouchard wins 5-way UCP race in Calgary-Lougheed
Restaurant manager Eric Bouchard defeated Sherrisa Celis, Max DeGroat, Mark Fiselier, and Michelle Mather to win the UCP nomination in Calgary-Lougheed.
The riding was represented by former premier Jason Kenney from 2017 until his resignation in November 2022.
NDP members in the riding voted to select Venkat Akkiraj over Kim Wagner in that party’s nomination vote this week. Akkiraj is a law student and former organizer with the Ontario NDP.
City Councillor jumps into Grande Prairie UCP race
City Councillor Gladys Blackmore is the fourth candidate to enter the UCP nomination contest in Grande Prairie. Blackmore served on City Council from 2001-2010 before making an unsuccessful bids for mayor in 2010 and 2013. She returned to city council in 2021.
She joins Nolan Dyck, Larry Gibson, and Tayyab Parvez in the race to choose a UCP successor to retiring MLA Tracy Allard.
The UCP MLA for the neighbouring Grande Prairie-Wapiti riding, Finance Minister Travis Toews, has still not announced whether he plans to run for re-election. Toews is now the only remaining MLA who has not announced their plans for the May election.
Hinshaw critic wins UCP nomination in Lethbridge-West
Torry Tanner defeated Rick Dempsey to win the UCP nomination vote in Lethbridge-West. Tanner was a participant in an unsuccessful lawsuit against former Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw challenging Alberta’s COVID-19 public health restrictions.
The riding is currently represented by NDP Shannon Phillips.
Other nomination updates
Calgary-Foothills: The Alberta Party disqualified Shaoli Wang as a candidate after a series of embarrassing social media posts were revealed. Wang will instead run as an Independent candidate.
Cypress-Medicine Hat: James Finkbeiner and Justin Wright are on the ballot when UCP members vote to nominate a candidate on March 16. The riding is currently represented by Independent MLA Drew Barnes.
Edmonton-City Centre: Richard Wong is the UCP candidate in this downtown Edmonton riding.
Leduc-Beaumont: Heather Feldbusch, Nam Kular, Brandon Lunty, Dawn Miller, Dave Quest, and Karen Richert are running for the UCP nomination. A vote is scheduled for March 18.
Peace River: Nancy O’Neill is running for the Independence Party of Alberta nomination.
Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre: Former Clearwater County Reeve Tim Hovenwill run as an Independent candidate. Hoven was disqualified from running for the UCP nomination against Jason Nixon last year. It was widely believed that Hoven could have defeated Nixon, who was then serving as former premier Kenney’s chief lieutenant.
