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.
We are now 18 months away from the next scheduled provincial election in October 2027 and we don’t know what the electoral map is going to look like (we’ll find out by November 2026). We don’t even know what our political environment might resemble by that time.
Albertans are being forced on a collision course with a political storm unlike anything anyone who’s involved in provincial politics has seen in their lifetimes.
A referendum on Alberta’s separation from Canada is expected to happen in October 2026 along with at least 9 questions proposed by Premier Smith ranging from abolishing the Senate to limiting access immigrants have to health care and education (Smith is expected to make an announcement about these on April 23). And there might even be a question about banning coal mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains.
Some of these incredibly divisive referendum questions have the potential to dramatically reshape and divide communities and politics in Alberta in ways we haven’t seen in generations — especially with the threat of foreign interference and misinformation promoting Alberta becoming the 51st State.
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.
“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.”
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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.
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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.
Candidate nomination season kicks off in Alberta
It could be 18 months before Albertans line up to mark their ballots in the next provincial election but that isn’t stopping Alberta’s main opposition party from starting to nominate candidates ahead of the vote.
The Alberta NDP started nominating candidates this week, far ahead of the scheduled October 2027 vote. A much earlier election was rumoured but appears increasingly unlikely as we move further into 2026.
NDP MLA Sarah Hoffman became the first candidate nominated ahead of the next election when she was acclaimed in Edmonton-Glenora on March 3. Hoffman has represented the riding since 2015 and served as Deputy Premier and Minister of Health in the NDP government led by Premier Rachel Notley from 2015 to 2019.
The following night, on March 4, the NDP nominated first term MLA Samir Kayande for re-election in Calgary-Elbow and, last night, MLA Peggy Wright was selected to run for re-election in Edmonton-Beverly-Clarevew.
There’s a baked-in analysis in every Alberta provincial budget that is impossible to ignore: Alberta relies too much on revenues from oil and gas royalties to fund the daily operations of government.
The other baked-in part of the analysis is what Albertans want: well-funded public services without having to pay more taxes for them.
From a first glance, it sure looks like that’s what Albertans got in Minister of Finance Nate Horner’s budget tabled today in the Legislature.
The budget doesn’t appear to include any big spending cuts, but it does include something Conservatives in this province used to like saying they wouldn’t do: run a deficit. This budget runs a big deficit of $9.4 billion and projects deficits for the next two budgets.
“Cut the bullshit. Call the election.”
Those were the words Alberta NDP deputy leader Rakhi Pancholi directed at Danielle Smith the morning after the Premier took to the television waves to blame immigration for the provincial government’s budget problems and announce a suite of nine referendum questions to be put to Albertans on October 19.
The 38-MLA NDP opposition has struggled to gain traction and define itself since former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi replaced former premier Rachel Notley as leader a year and a half ago, but those six words from Pancholi last Friday cut through the noise and were a blunt reminder that she is one of the party’s most effective voices.
An Alberta politics deep dive on Craft Politics (originally published on the Daveberta Substack)
I recently joined Joseph Lavoie and Andrew Percy on Craft Politics for a deep dive discussion about Alberta separatism and how it’s shaping Alberta politics in 2026.
We had a broad-ranging discussion about Alberta politics, the current separatist movement’s roots in the COVID-19 pandemic and how its supporters became key players inside the United Conservative Party, and who might lead the pro-Canada campaign in a possible separation referendum later this year.
We covered a lot of ground in this discussion but I’m remiss for going through the list players in the separatism debate without mentioning the role of First Nations communities and the Treaties signed between First Nations and the Crown. That’s another important layer to this political debate.
Thank you to Joseph and Andrew for inviting me on their podcast. Be sure to subscribe to Craft Politics on your podcast listening app of choice or watch their interviews on YouTube.
I will be joining Edmonton Strathcona MP Heather McPherson and other guests on Sunday, February 15 for an online discussion about Alberta’s role in Canada at her Alberta Belongs In Canada event. McPherson is running for the leadership of the New Democratic Party of Canada.
Early March candidate meetings scheduled in Calgary and Edmonton ridings
With rumours of an early provincial election circulating since last year, the Alberta NDP looks like it will be the first political party out of the gate to nominate candidates ahead of the next vote.
The NDP website lists candidate nomination meetings scheduled in Edmonton-Glenora on March 3, Calgary-Elbow on March 4, Calgary-Klein on March 5, Edmonton-Beverly-Clareview on March 6 and Calgary-Edgemont on March 7.
All five of these ridings are represented by NDP MLAs who will be seeking re-election if they secure their party’s nominations.
Longtime Daveberta readers will know that I am keenly interested in tracking candidate nominations ahead of provincial and federal elections in Alberta, so I am pleased to share with you that I am continuing this tradition as we approach the next election.
The time to stand up for a Strong Alberta within a Strong Canada is now.
It’s still unclear who will lead the pro-Canada side in a referendum campaign that could happen as early as fall of this year. This is likely because a lot of prominent supporters of federalism in Alberta have had a hard time believing Albertans would vote in favour of separation or that a referendum will even be held in the first place.
Polls show support for Alberta leaving Canada sits at around 28 per cent and drops to 15 per cent when people are faced with the possible consequences, but this is not the time for Albertans who also count themselves as proud Canadians to be complacent.
In another time, the Premier of Alberta would be a strong voice against separatism, but Danielle Smith is now leading a party with an activist base deeply engaged in the separatist movement and she is not interested in upsetting that base of supporters.
