The Decibel - The Alberta government is accused of gerrymandering

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

The Alberta government is drawing controversy over electoral politics. They’re being accused of gerrymandering – the practice of redrawing voting districts to boost prospects in elections. Instead of approving a new electoral map provided by a commission, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith voted to appoint a new commission to appoint a panel that will create a new map. Matthew Scace is a reporter from the Globe’s Calgary bureau. He joins us today to break down what this decision will mean for the Alberta government and why it’s causing such a stir. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Alberta government is being accused of gerrymandering. That's a process especially common in the U.S., where elected officials redraw district boundaries to boost their prospects in the next election. We don't often talk about how electoral boundaries are decided in Canada, because typically, it's non-partisan and uncontentious. But this time, it is contentious. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith decided to ignore the recommendations for a new electoral map from an independent commission,

and her government voted to strike up a new committee and create a new map. The Globe's Calgary reporter, Matthew Skace, has been covering this story. Today, he explains why the Alberta government made this decision and why it's causing such a concern. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Matt. Thanks for being here today. Cheryl, let's talk about maps. Let's talk about maps.

This controversy the Alberta government is facing right now is complicated, right? So you're here to help us understand what's going on here. We'll start with the basics. We're focusing on electoral boundaries maps. What exactly is that? Electoral boundaries are basically the bedrock of what forms our electoral system. So every eight to ten years, we build the map. map of our provinces and our federal system. And those ridings are effectively the people we vote for.

So where I live in Calgary, I vote for the person I want to represent me in the legislature. So these are sort of the building blocks of our system. And then that is what forms our entire legislature or House of Commons. This is a basic question. But why do these maps matter? The maps matter because they are basically the math behind who forms government. So when my writing votes for the Alberta MVP that gives them one seat. And when another writing votes for the United Conservative Party, that gives them one seat. And it adds up all the way to the amount of seats that we have in the legislature. So right now in Alberta, we have 87 seats and the United Conservative Party has a majority. So that's why it matters is that's how we form government as a

seat system. Okay. You mentioned that these maps get redrawn every eight to 10 years. What's the process of redrawing these maps? Right. So the process begins when the government in Alberta sets the number of seats. And that happened about a year and a half ago. It's slightly different in every province. In Alberta, the government sets the number of seats. And that is the number of seats. The Electoral Boundaries Commission is given to work with.

The Electoral Boundaries Commission is a group of people. It's five people, two appointed by the opposition, two appointed by the government, one by the premier, selected, not appointed. And they are the people who get together and travel the province and try to figure out how this map should work so that all parts of the province are equally represented. So you're making a bunch of different considerations around rural, urban, what the community needs, how to make it fair. So people are represented in northern

Alberta. They're represented in the cities. They're represented in small inner city communities. So on and so forth. It's a really complicated process and that happens every, you know, eight to 10 years. Okay. So that's an important distinction here that they're not just looking at strict population numbers to determine these writings, or looking at a whole bunch of different factors? No. The U.S. really adopts this methodology of one person, one vote. The ridings are generally determined by an average number, and they try to get each riding to be as close to that average number, but by law, they're allowed to have a certain variance. It's about 25%. So if they decide that they want to have a larger riding in a rural area, because populations are more

bars and rural areas, it can be a little bit lower. Whereas in cities, they tend to be a little bit bigger than that average. Okay. And so this commission, they're doing consultations in this, going to people in the communities asking what they need, that kind of thing. Yeah. So the past year, they've basically spent going around Alberta asking people what they think the map should look like.

And it's a long, really exhausting process. They're going all over the place. In the final report, there are photos of them hanging out. in a drumhiler, Tim Hortons, with the big dinosaur mural in the background. Oh, okay. Yeah. And so they're taking all this feedback, and then they end up with these big maps and they decide how to draw the boundaries.

So, Matt, when they were drawing the map, how many seats are they working with? And how does that process work? So the government decides how many seats they're going to get the commission. Right now, Alberta has 87 seats. In November of 2024, they decided to bring it up to 89. other provinces give their commissions leeway. So in BC, they have completely leeway to decide how many seats are appropriate. In Quebec, they're given a range that they can work within.

So they have a bit of a sandbox. Alberta does not have a sandbox. They're given the number and they're asked to work with that number. So this commission was given 89 seats and that's what they had to deal with. So what normally happens is this group comes up with one map and it is given to the government. The government looks at that map. says okay and if everything goes to normal, they vote on that and that's the next map you have for the election. I just want to ask you about why this is the way these maps are created.

Like, what's the logic behind having this independent commission? Yeah, this is a real bedrock of Canadian democracy. The independence of the commission is generally viewed as a way of keeping politics out, keeping legislatures out of the process. The problem in the U.S. that comes up over and over again is gerrymandering where legislatures and governments decide what the boundaries look like so they can build the map to their partisan advantage and give them a better chance of putting the next election. In Canada, we really have tried to stay away from that. A lot of experts will tell you that because these members are appointed or selected by the government and the opposition, there is still a strain of politics. There is still politics involved,

but it's sort of a perfectly imperfect process. Okay. So what happened this year? So back in the fall, we got an interim report. And what we saw was that everything was pretty fine. It was a majority consent from all of the commission members. There was some irked MLAs about rural writings in northern Alberta, but generally we thought that this was on the path to being a routine boundaries commission report. That's not what we got when it was tabled a couple weeks ago. First, we ended up with a majority report, which was signed off by the chair and two other members. And then we ended up with a second report that was signed off

by two commissioners. They happen to be the two commissioners who were selected by the UCP. This is, as far as we know, the first time this has happened, where we have two competing maps being presented in the legislature. It presented a choice for the government,

which is a very strange situation for it to be in when it normally just has one report that adopts wholesale and we send it on its way, and that's the map we have to the next election. Okay, so tell me about these two reports. Yeah, so the majority is the leading one because that is signed off by the UCP selected chair and the two NDP selected commission members.

Its main focus was on how to allocate the two new seats that were given to them, given how many people have come into Alberta, mostly in Edmonton, Calgary over the past several years. The bottom line was that the growth in and around Calgary in Edmonton was so huge that what they ended up deciding was they were going to get rid of two rural rid of two rural ridings to make way for those new seats in the big cities. They did say that they felt a better map was possible with more seats available to them,

but they may do with what they had, given the circumstances and what the parameters they had. So they had these 89 writings, and they removed two rural Alberta ridings and added two to Edmonton and Calgary. And then what about this minority report? What did that say? So the minority report had a different view

on how to manage all these demographic and population changes. So that was the core issue here. They had quite a different view on how to do that, which was mainly grounded in this thing called hybrid divisions, which takes rural populations and urban populations and puts them together in the same writing. They advocate for more hybrid writings. There are a lot of mixtures. For example, in red deer right now, you have two writings in red deer. It's red deer north and red deer south. The minority proposes having four writings around red deer that are all urban, rural hybrids.

And it makes red deer a much bigger region than it is right now in the electoral map. They viewed it as a way to reduce polarization and friction between urban and rural communities, which generally tend to have different priorities. Just the distance you have to travel to get health care is different in a rural area than in an urban one. And they did express fear that as Alberta's urban populations continue to grow because they are growing and growing and growing, that rural communities' representation, in the legislature and government would be diminished over time. So this minority report was from the two UCP members.

And this was a completely different map. And as you talked about, they kind of combined urban and rural writings into some pretty funky contortions, right? Yeah. If you put the two maps of Calgary side by side, they're two different worlds. I mean, the Calgary map for the majority report

has these neat lines that sort of delineate the city boundaries. And it looks a lot. lot like the map that we have currently in Alberta. There's a clear division between rural and urban. The map that the minority proposed is significantly different. It has these, I don't even know how to describe it, but they wrap around each other at times. They expand very far into the areas outside of Calgary that are quite rural. There are no delineations between the city boundary and the not Calgary, I guess. It's a very different vision of how Calgary's electoral map should work. What did these UCP members of the panel say about why they brought forward this other report?

So the minority's logic was that they need to accommodate for the population growth in the larger cities. And the way they want to do that is to bring them rural and urban closer together by creating hybrid ridings. They argue they want to decrease polarization between the areas by bringing their needs altogether in one. And so this is sort of their way of giving rural communities a bigger voice. in the legislature. Of course, that comes with major political implications. The UCP is an incredibly strong party in rural Alberta. The Alberta MVP has locked down Edmonton and Calgary is a complete battleground and we'll probably decide the next election. The big question that is hanging over this right now that we don't have an answer to is why these views were not expressed in the

interim report because there was no sign that this report was going to come when the final report came. and so far those two commission numbers who were both UCP selected have not spoken publicly about why they diverged from the majority and from what the majority has said that diversion onto this new path happened very, very late in the process. Okay. Did the other people in the panel respond to this other report? They sure did. Yeah. So there is a section in the report and it's a response to the minority report. and it would be an understatement to say that they eviscerated the minority report. They first off start by saying that the map would violate the Constitution in numerous ways.

They note that there was no public consultation on the map because it was not included in the interim report. So there's this one line towards the end of the report and they are asking, what might be the minority's true motivation for this? our friends south of the border may have a term for this type of redistricting. And that, of course, is the G word. That's g-mandering. Uh-huh. Yes.

Okay. So they are basically accusing them of gerrymandering. Can you help me understand that concern? Their argument is that by creating these hybrid writings that, again, like they say, defy logic, would dilute urban voters, hand more power to rural voters. And it would hand a massive electoral advantage to the nays. conservative party. Like early analysis that we've seen is that this would thrust the UCP into a super majority territory if we took the election results from 2023 and put them in the next election.

So this would dramatically change the electoral picture in Alberta to the point where this would put the Alberta NDP's future in complete peril. So this would be a fundamental change for the Alberta NDP if the government decided to adopt the minority report. It is a, fundamental question for Alberta about what happens next with these maps. And that's the question that basically came at the next day after this report was tabled is what is the government going to do? Are they going to pick the minority report? They're going to pick the majority report. We'll be right back. Okay. So there's these two reports, which is an unprecedented move in this process of creating electoral boundaries in Alberta. But then there's also a third option. Tell me about that,

Matt. Yeah. So there is a list of recommendations that's included in this report. And on one of the pages there is this recommendation number five, and it's written solely by the chair, Justice Dallas Miller. And he gets into the issue that they ran into over and over again, which is the fact that they had only two new seats for a province whose population has grown immensely over the past eight years. and he says if we could, we would have loved to have 91 seats, but we dealt with the hand we were given. He recommends instead, if the government decides to reject the majority report, they can strike a committee which will then appoint a new independent advisory panel, which will then decide how to build a map with 91 seats.

It's a recommendation he made completely by himself, and he noted that no other commission members were willing to sign off on that recommendation. So he's making it completely on his own. But it is a potential third option that the government was given. And it ended up being the one that they chose. You said Daniel Smith's UCP government decided to go with this third option. Can you walk me through exactly what that means? Yeah. So in taking this route, the government is effectively dismissing the entire Boundaries report.

What they did last week is on the order paper in the legislature, they said they would be moving a motion that would increase the number of seats to 91. They will strike a all-party, quote, committee that will be dominated by a majority of UCP members, and that that committee would pick an advisory panel to advise them on how to create a map with 91 seats. So effectively tossing out the entire report that was given to them several weeks ago and saying, we're going to redo the process, we're going to redraw the maps, we're going to make 91 seats and that is how we will decide what our next electoral map looks like.

I got to say, Matt, this sounds a lot like the panel that just created the map that the Alberta government rejected. How is this different? It is both similar and different. The fundamental difference is that this advisory panel, which is going to also be a five-person group of people who are not elected officials, they will have a report and they will be sending it to this committee of elected officials. that is dominated by the United Conservative Party.

When they receive that report, they will look at it. They will decide what to do with it. They may reject it. They may accept it in totality. They may make alterations. And whatever they decide to do with it will eventually get sent back into the people's house, the Alberta legislature. And that will be voted on and adopted, presumably, as the next map for the 2027 election.

So this is kind of this extra layer in this version. Exactly. There's an extra layer that is including public elected officials. Okay, I just want to make sure I'm getting this right. So before you had this independent panel that provided their report straight to the government, and now you've got a panel providing their recommendations to a committee that then passes it onto the government. That's right. You got it.

Okay. What did Danielle Smith say? about why they were taking this tack? Yeah, she references a lot of Justice Miller's words, specifically lamenting the loss of the rural ridings. She has pitched it as a way to represent rural Alberta. She has frequently referenced the desire for 91 seats that they did not have when they created the report.

The premier said, based on particularly Justice Miller's words, it's not the perfect map, and we should try to get next. I'd view one seat so we can represent a rural Alberta and figure this out now. And just to say that Danielle Smith and Daniel Smith's government is very popular in rural Alberta. Yeah, very popular. Is there an argument that Premier Smith needed to restart this whole process because there were two options presented to her government? That is a good question. I have heard that from one of the commission members from 2017, who was a UCP selected member.

She actually wrote her own minority dissent back in 2017. The difference between her dissent and what the minority chose to do is the minority this time provided a map, whereas she provided a rationale of things that she thought were not preferable given rural representation. She also had concerns about how rural communities were being represented, but she didn't provide a new option to the government. Matt, what has the reaction been to this move to redraw the map? The reaction has been violent from the opposition. They are fully aware of the fact that these maps have a,

a major impact on their electoral future as well, have criticized the government repeatedly over the past week. They spent question period on Thursday and Monday, completely eating up time, talking about this specific issue, pressing the government on it. They have called the process a legitimate because of elected officials' involvement in the process. They'll still be participated. I will note that they're going to put two people on the government panel. However, they've been the first ones to call this gerrymandering, and they've been sending buses with plastered signs already, saying that Daniel Smith's trying to rig the next election. So their reaction has been strong. We may see a legal challenge for them as well.

We don't know yet. But this is the biggest issue on their plate right now. Yeah, I mean, there's also a former Alberta Premier, Rachel Nali, actually wrote a column in the globe talking about this as well. So there's lots of reaction here. Yeah. And she makes the point that when she received that last boundaries report, she looked at it and didn't like it. She really had some problems with it because it deleted a rioting that her father represented. It meshed two ridings that were very strong for the NDP.

And in her Globe op-ed, she said, I took it anyway because it's not my business. Why are they so worried about this? Like it sounds like it's kind of the same thing. There's an independent panel, but now you have this extra layer of a government committee. What's their concern? The concern is that the government is going to get their hands on the maps and tweak them to their advantage. This extra layer of a committee is giving the government full latitude to possibly make changes to the map before it gets sent to the legislature. And that's something that we haven't dealt with in Alberta, at least since the 1960s, when the idea of independent commissions really took off and became.

the standard for Canada. Daniel Smith did say that they'll be taking the majority report, just adding those two seats, but there's still this concern you're talking about. Yeah, exactly. And the way it would be described right now is a bit of a trust exercise. The Premier said that they will take the majority report and apply to new seats to that report and largely keep it. That's what the MVP's calling for. It is a challenge to do, obviously, because there is no map that exists right now that has 91 ridings. And so that does mean that there's going to have to be some give and take with the new map. And it's a live question about what that map will look like. However, there's a chance that that map does largely resemble the majority of report. And this

goes away without as much drama as we're seeing or some of the critics are expecting right now. So what happens now with this? Like, what are you watching for? I'm watching for a few things. One, I'm interested to see who is on the appointed panel and who will want to take that job given the fever pitch we've reached. The other thing is legal challenges. We have not really settled the issue of whether legislatures can have input on matters around electoral maps. And so depending on whether this map does fiddle around the edges and is perceived to be an effort to gendarming, this could face legal challenge. The actual process that the UCP is taking right now could also face a legal challenge just because elected officials are involved. What about the public? Do we have a sense of how the public is reacting to this or are you watching for how the public might react to this?

It's hard to say what the public thinks right now. It's one of those things that there are a lot of concerns, but the thing hasn't actually happened yet. And like I said, this could all sort of go away if the government does table a map that is largely acceptable to most people. So there's a bit of as yet to be seen with this, but people who are very politically engaged are watching this very, very closely. So I would say there is a large component of Alberta that is watching this because they are politically minded people. And I think there are a lot of people who are still sort of wondering what's going on because we don't actually have an example of what that map is going to look like, except for the minority report. The government has said that they've rejected that. So it's a lot of question marks hanging in the air right now. Matt, I feel like I learned a lot today.

Thank you so much for walking us through this. Thanks for having me. That was Matthew Skace, a staff reporter for the globe based in Calgary. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our associate producer and intern is Emily Conahan. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin and Mihal Stein. Our editor is David Crosby.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.