It’s the most contentious issue in Alberta politics that we’re not talking about. I give you Alberta’s Electoral Boundaries Commission, which every eight years or so erases and redraws the province’s political ridings like a five-year-old playing with an Etch A Sketch.
Well actually, I can’t give it to you yet. A new boundaries commission has yet to be set up by the provincial government. That could happen any day, but likely won’t happen until the fall, when, according to provincial law, the clock will start ticking on October 31, 2024, marking eight years since the last commission was established.
After that the government technically has 24 months to get the commission up and running. Premier Danielle Smith has indicated she wants to get a commission moving this year, so that any boundary changes for the 2027 election are known by the end of 2025. Political parties need time to organize constituency associations and nominate candidates well ahead of the next election.
As for the clock analogy, sometimes the ticking is a metronome putting you to sleep, other times it’s a bomb about to explode. After the 2002 electoral boundaries commission took away a seat from Edmonton, for example, city residents were so angry that in the 2004 election they took it out on the government, reducing the number of PC MLAs in the city from 11 to just three (that reduction also takes into account the one seat that was cut).
On the surface, dividing the province into equally populated ridings is simple: Alberta’s population of 4,800,000 divided by 87 seats equals 55,173 citizens per riding. And yes, it would be relatively simple to divide large urban areas into equal ridings of 55,000 people. But try that in some rural areas (meaning not Edmonton or Calgary) and you’d have ridings pretty much the size of Belgium. This is why provincial law allows that up to four (rural) ridings need not offer “equal” representation but merely “effective” representation. These outliers, such as Lesser Slave Lake, can contain up to 50 per cent fewer people than the average. This keeps the ridings from being too large. According to the 2021 census, Lesser Slave Lake now has 26,715 people, while Edmonton-South has 68,950. This exemption also means that, on paper, a vote in Lesser Slave Lake is worth 2.5 times as much as one in Edmonton-South.
Will the UCP want to give more seats to Edmonton and Calgary, even if their population demands it?
Redrawing boundaries is not just a game of numbers but very much one of politics. A five-person electoral boundaries committee is composed of two people named by the government and two by the Opposition. The chair, ostensibly non-partisan and typically a judge, is also named by the government.
Under Conservative governments of the past, redrawing boundaries was a game that tended to shortchange Alberta’s more progressive cities, most notably Edmonton, while rewarding rural ridings that reliably voted Conservative. Rural Alberta, of course, is the Conservatives’ heartland and has been since dinosaurs first roamed the hallways of the Legislature.
In 2010 premier Ed Stelmach realized that the cities, given their fast-growing populations (and in the interest of democracy), deserved more seats, while rural Alberta needed an electoral haircut. But he didn’t want to diminish the PC government’s rural base. So he simply added four more seats, growing the legislative assembly from 83 to 87. So much for the Conservatives’ penchant for smaller government. Of the four new seats, Calgary got two, Edmonton one, and one went to the booming Fort McMurray region. Problem solved. But not really.
In 2016 Alberta’s NDP government did what PC governments had long dreaded. It set up a commission (two NDP appointees, two Wildrose appointees, one judge) that looked at Alberta’s shifting population, then cut three seats from the rural areas and added one to Edmonton and two to the Calgary region. Some MLAs in seats outside the cities complained, but the issue was lost in the raucous leadup to the 2019 election.
Now the Danielle Smith government has to set up its own electoral boundaries commission—and do its own political math. The UCP cannot ignore the phenomenal growth in the province’s population in the past few years, which has been centred in the major cities. But the political reality is that in the 2023 election the NDP won all 20 seats in Edmonton and 14 of 26 in Calgary. The UCP is very much a government reliant on the “rest of Alberta.”
Will a UCP-created boundaries commission want to give more seats to Edmonton and Calgary, even if the cities’ growing share of the population demands it? Will it want to reduce the number of seats in rural Alberta, even if their shrinking share of the population warrants it? Will it decide to “pull a Stelmach” and simply add more seats to the legislative assembly?
Two sad immutables of life are death and taxes. Alberta politicians get a third one: redrawing the province’s electoral boundaries every eight years. n
Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.
____________________________________________
Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.
