Central Alberta, the region between Edmonton and Calgary around Red Deer, includes the mountain parks of Banff and Jasper. Constituencies here include Maskwacis-Wetaskiwin, Camrose, Drumheller, Olds, Rimbey, Innisfail-Sylvan Lake and Lacombe-Ponoka. This is traditionally a deeply conservative area, but the NDP took some seats here provincially in 2015, and could do so again.

Banff-Kananaskis: Environmental issues boost the NDP in a rural riding

Main candidates in 2023:

– UCP: Miranda Rosin lives in Canmore and worked for Coca-Cola before entering politics in 2019.

– NDP: Sarah Elmeligi is a wildlife biologist who studies how humans and wildlife can better coexist.

– Green: Regan Boychuk founded Reclaim Alberta and is a researcher with the Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project.

In 2015, when this riding included Cochrane, the PC’s and Wildrose split the vote almost exactly (28.2 and 28.9 per cent). This allowed operating-room nurse and NDP candidate Cam Westhead to run up the middle, taking the seat with 42.8 per cent of the vote. In 2019 Westhead’s voters stuck by him (42 per cent), but the by-then-reunited conservatives—represented by neophyte Miranda Rosin—wrested the riding back.

The citizens of Banff voted heavily for the NDP in both recent elections, as did members of the Stoney Nation and many residents of Canmore. But people in Bragg Creek and Cochrane were more drawn to the UCP. The riding is drifting leftwards, however, thanks to new boundaries and unpopular UCP policy. Even as Alberta’s 2017 boundaries redistribution gave the riding the Springbank area—the fifth-richest postal code in Canada—it lopped off Cochrane, which now gets its own riding.

Kenney-era policy also angered many people here. The UCP proposed to shut down 175 provincial parks and recreation areas, only reversing course after huge protests. It brought in a

$90 Kananaskis Park user fee, then backtracked on a promise to similarly charge a fee to destructive ATVers and “mudboggers” in McLean Creek. And it pushed ahead with the Springbank Dry Dam, a project designed to protect Calgary from floods, even over ranchers’,  acreage owners’ and incumbent MLA Rosin’s objections. Rosin herself has been largely invisible other than to make a social media comment on supposed federal “COVID concentration camps” and to express her preference for two-tier healthcare. Now poll aggregator 338 is calling this riding an NDP pickup.

The 2023 contest will principally be between Rosin and Sarah Elmeligi, who won the NDP nomination over three other candidates. The leader of Alberta’s Greens, Jordan Wilkie, was slated to run in this riding but switched to Edmonton-Rutherford. Regan Boychuk will now represent that party here.

Red Deer South: City solicitor challenges libertarian

Main candidates in 2023:

– NDP: Michelle Baer is the City Solicitor of Red Deer. She also sponsors refugees and supports newcomers to Canada as they integrate into Red Deer.

– UCP: Jason Stephan is a tax lawyer, chartered accountant and founder of the Red Deer Taxpayers Association.

Red Deer is the third-biggest city in the province – population 107,073. Last year it had its largest growth of international migration in 20 years. Red Deer-South went NDP in 2015, electing Barb Miller. In 2019 the UCP’s Jason Stephan soundly defeated Miller (16,159 votes to her 6,844). The NDP were leading in the polls in 2021 and tied with the UCP in late 2022. But now poll aggregator 338 predicts the UCP will get 48 per cent of the popular vote in this constituency compared to the NDP’s 41 per cent.

The Red Deer Regional Hospital is the number-one issue in the constituency and a lightning rod for political controversy. It serves an area of a half-million people and has been over capacity and understaffed for years. In 2022 Jason Kenney’s government committed $1.8-billion for expansion and renovation, which included $100-million previously promised in early 2020. At that time construction was supposed to begin in 2021, but nothing happened. Still nothing has happened. When deputy premier Nathan Neudorf said in early 2023 that construction of a healthcare facility “has complexities that most of the general public doesn’t understand,” local NDP candidate Michelle Baer responded, “For the minister to imply that residents wouldn’t understand the complexities of its construction and the delay is a slap in the face.”

Hospital construction was to begin in 2021; nothing happened.

The irony is that back in 2019 incumbent Jason Stephan blamed the NDP for not taking enough action to protect citizens. “Red Deer hospital must provide necessary life-saving services for residents,” he said. “The provincial government under Rachel Notley has failed to do that.” During the pandemic he vacationed in Phoenix and as a result lost his position on the Treasury Board. Later Stephan called on Kenney to resign, and said about the UCP government’s mask mandates that “the cure was worse than the disease.”

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By most accounts the 2023 election will be determined by who can win the most seats in Calgary. In 2019 the UCP won 23 of the city’s 26 seats. The NDP got three, down from the 15 they won in 2015. Regaining those seats won’t be easy. In nine of the last 10 provincial elections, Calgary gave conservative parties a majority of the city’s seats. Now, however, in key suburban battleground ridings, polls have the NDP and the UCP virtually tied.

Calgary-Varsity: The future of healthcare is on the ballot

Main candidates in 2023:

– UCP: Jason Copping is Alberta’s Minister of Health and formerly the minister of labour and immigration.

– Alberta Party: Angela Grace is a psychologist and an advocate against the UCP changes to the K-6 curriculum.

– NDP: Dr. Luanne Metz is a professor and the former head of neurology at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary.

Calgary-Varsity is a healthcare hub, containing the Alberta Children’s Hospital, the Foothills Hospital and the new Calgary Cancer Centre. Since it was first contested in 1993, the riding has variously been won by the Progressive Conservatives, the Liberals, the NDP and the UCP. In 2019 the race was tight, with the UCP’s Jason Copping edging out the NDP’s Anne McGrath by less than a 3 per cent margin (about 600 votes). Copping is now the Minister of Health. Compared to his combative predecessor, Tyler Shandro, Copping has projected an air of relative competence that has kept him in the role through the transition from premier Jason Kenney to premier Danielle Smith. Still, as health minister Copping has repeatedly undermined public healthcare, from expanding private lab services to contracting out thousands of orthopedic surgeries to a private for-profit company.

Dr. Luanne Metz—a professor of neurology at the U of C and a recipient of the Alberta Medal of Distinguished Service (which recognizes physicians who have made an outstanding personal contribution to the medical profession and to all Albertans)—is the NDP candidate in the riding.

She secured the nomination early, in summer of 2021. “As a physician and a researcher, I decided to enter politics because I knew that the increasing privatization of healthcare by the UCP would not improve outcomes for patients,” she announced. “Privatization will not lead to better results. Instead, it will draw resources away from the public system, eroding it further. This has been shown time and again in study after study. I’m here for public policy that is based on evidence, not ideology.”

Calgary-North: Suburban battleground

Main candidates in 2023:

– NDP: Rajesh Angral is the CEO, producer and host of Sabrang Radio and the president of the Punjabi Council of Commerce in Calgary.

– UCP: Muhammad Yaseen is the Parliamentary Secretary of Community Outreach, previously associate minister of immigration and multiculturalism.

With many new communities and lots of space for more development at the northern end of the city, Calgary-North has much in common with neighbouring suburban constituencies such as Calgary-Foothills, to the west, and Calgary-North East. As with those ridings, Calgary-North has a higher median household income than the provincial average ($116,612 vs. $93,931) and a higher percentage of people with post-secondary education (73.4 per cent vs. 63.9 per cent). Also similar to those constituencies, Calgary-North has a large visible minority population (62.3 per cent vs. 23.5 per cent for Alberta), and polls project both the UCP and the NDP could win here. The incumbent Muhammad Yaseen, an engineer before running for office in 2019, has had a relatively low profile in the UCP government, and was left out of both Jason Kenney’s and Danielle Smith’s cabinets. In contrast, at least locally, NDP candidate Rajesh Angral has a prominent voice in Calgary-North as a radio host and community organizer of multicultural and sport events such as Culturefest, Vaisakhi Mela and Calgary cricket tournaments. He won a contested NDP nomination race over two other candidates.

Calgary-Glenmore: A sunny new energy economy?

Main candidates in 2023:

– NDP: Nagwan Al-Guneid is director of Business Renewables Centre Canada.

– UCP: Whitney Issik is the incumbent MLA.

– Green: Steven Maffioli is a retail specialist with Freedom Mobile.

Calgary–Glenmore has been a litmus test for Alberta politics.

In 2009 the Wildrose won a by-election here, signalling the party’s rise. In 2015 the NDP won the riding by six votes, highlighting the narrow margin by which they won the provincial election. In 2019 conservative activist Whitney Issik won here for the UCP with 55.6 per cent of the vote, decrying “the decline of the oil and gas business” and the “out-of-work engineers who are in our constituency now.”

To run against Issik in 2023 the NDP recruited Nagwan Al-Guneid, the director of Business Renewables Centre Canada—a non-profit that supports the growth of industrial scale wind and solar energy development. “We’ve been door-knocking a lot, and every third door is either a geologist, a geophysicist or an oil and gas engineer,” says Al-Guneid. “I want to help them to find a home with Alberta’s NDP.”

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Edmonton has a history of being more progressive than anywhere else in Alberta. The city has a large public sector, large universities and many working people. Liberals took every seat here in 1993. Today Edmonton is an NDP stronghold: 19 of Edmonton’s 20 seats went to the NDP in 2019. But if Edmonton is awash in orange, many ridings in the “donut” immediately surrounding the city are solid blue. A few are considered to be “races to watch.”

Morinville-St. Albert: NDP cattlewoman could flip this “rurban” riding

Main candidates in 2023:

– UCP: Dale Nally, a former general manager of big-box retail stores and the associate minister of natural gas in Jason Kenney’s inaugural cabinet, became Minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction in 2022.

– NDP: Karen Shaw is a cattle rancher and four-term (14 year) councillor for Sturgeon County.

 

Edmonton–South West: Edmonton’s only UCP seat

Main candidates in 2023:

– Green: Jeff Cullihall works in communications technology and is a climate systems student and educator.

– NDP: Nathan Ip is a three-term Edmonton Public School Board trustee particularly concerned about the UCP’s draft curriculum.

– UCP: Kaycee Madu is a deputy premier of Alberta (along with Nathan Neudorf) and the minister of skilled trades and professions

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kaycee Madu was the only UCP MLA elected in Edmonton in 2019. In 2015 Thomas Dang, the youngest MLA ever to be elected in Alberta, had taken the riding for the NDP. He got almost twice as many votes as PC incumbent Matt Jeneroux—12,352 to 6,316. (Jeneroux went on to become the federal MP for Edmonton-Riverbend.) In 2019 Dang chose to run in the new district of Edmonton-South, and UCP candidate Madu defeated the NDP’s John Archer 10,254 votes to 9,539.

Madu has been embroiled in one controversy or another ever since. As municipalities minister he repealed Alberta’s big-city charters and cut funding to cities by $236-million. He reduced the assessment value of oil and gas infrastructure, lowering the tax revenue of rural municipalities by as much as $291-million. His amendments to the Local Authorities Election Act removed the requirement that municipal candidates disclose their donors prior to election day. When the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association said their relationship with Madu was “broken,” he was shuffled to Justice—the first Black Canadian to serve as a provincial minister of justice.

After receiving a ticket for using his cellphone while driving in a school zone, Madu phoned Edmonton’s chief of police to complain. An investigation found that Madu had tried to interfere in the administration of justice. His call to the chief created a “reasonable perception of interference.” Madu was demoted to minister of labour and immigration. Critics inside and outside government said it was wrong for him to remain in cabinet at all. In fall 2022 Madu again created controversy when he thanked the “freedom convoys” for fighting against “tyrannical” federal COVID restrictions.

The poll aggregator 338 predicts Madu has only a 21 per cent chance of retaining the seat.

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Southern Alberta has a colourful electoral history—people in the Crowsnest elected communists in the 1930s—but for a few decades the region has been solidly Conservative or Wildrose blue. Lethbridge is the exception, with Liberals holding Lethbridge-East from 1993 to 2011, and the NDP’s Shannon Phillips representing Lethbridge-West since 2015 (and widely expected to hold the seat in 2023).

Livingstone-Macleod: Cracks in a conservative stronghold

Main candidates in 2023:

– UCP: Chelsae Petrovic is the mayor of Claresholm and a former nurse.

– NDP: Kevin Van Tighem is a biologist, former Banff National Park superintendent, writer and former Alberta Views columnist.

This riding extends from High River in the north to Waterton Lakes in the south, with the Rockies forming its western edge and the Blood Reserve running down its right. One-time local MLA and Wildrose leader Danielle Smith famously crossed the floor in 2014 and subsequently lost her PC nomination race here. Voters stuck with Wildrose in 2015. In 2019, with new boundaries and with conservatives briefly reunited, Tim Hortons franchisee Roger Reid won the riding for the UCP over rancher and NDP candidate Cam Gardner (71 per cent vs. 21 per cent).

Things may be changing. Just a short walk south of the diner owned by now-premier Smith in High River is the town library, which on the night of November 29, 2022, saw its meeting room overflowing with NDP supporters. Many declared they were former conservative voters. This might seem surprising. But the Kenney government’s attempt to reinstate open- pit coal mining in the eastern slopes was fiercely opposed by local ranchers and town dwellers alike (also: Corb Lund). After Reid said he wouldn’t run again, Nadine Wellwood was acclaimed for the UCP. She was then promptly disqualified by her own party for equating vaccine passports with the Nazis and expressing support for Vladimir Putin. Reid said he wouldn’t vote for her. Even the founder of the far-right Take Back Alberta denounced Wellwood: “We can’t begin praising tin pot dictators.” Claresholm mayor Chelsae Petrovic eventually won a new, contested UCP nomination race.

The NDP has an active and organized local constituency and a strong candidate in Kevin Van Tighem. Resentment about the UCP’s coal plan continues to smoulder, with Smith in late 2022 refusing to specify whether she supported new or expanded coal mines, saying only: “I’ll meet with the involved ministers and discuss all the available options.” Poll aggregator 338 is calling Livingstone-Macleod a “safe” UCP seat. But that party seems to be trying as hard as possible to give conservatives in the area a reason to make a statement in 2023—to vote NDP perhaps, or just to stay home.

Lethbridge-East: Could this riding flip again?

Main candidates in 2023:

– NDP: Rob Miyashiro is a two-term Lethbridge city councillor.

– UCP: Nathan Neudorf is the incumbent MLA and a deputy premier. He formerly worked in commercial construction.

Lethbridge-East stretches from the city’s northern edge to its southern outskirts and from downtown to the east industrial fringe. Like a typical Alberta riding, it has old and new communities and lots of commercial activity. But it’s notable for its independence from oil and gas. The average riding in Alberta has four times as much employment in energy as Lethbridge-East does, which in turn has twice as many manufacturing jobs per capita. Big employers here include Sunrise Poultry, Southland Trailers, Kawneer (windows and doors) and Cavendish Farms, McCain and PepsiCo (fries, fries and Doritos, respectively). Concerns about oil and gas and “just transitions” don’t resonate the same way in Lethbridge-East. With food-processing instead so vital, the UCP government announced in 2021 it would spend almost a billion dollars on irrigation canals to expand the 4.2-million acres of farmland east of the riding in what is branded as “Canada’s premier food corridor.”

Oil and gas concerns don’t resonate the same way here.

The race to represent the NDP was hotly contested. Rob Miyashiro won against three other candidates. MLA Nathan Neudorf was then named by Danielle Smith as Infrastructure Minister and one of two deputy premiers—an indication, perhaps, that he needs all the extra profile he can get.

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From Peace River to Grande Prairie and Fort McMurray to Cold Lake, the oil, gas and forestry industries are dominant, and a majority of voters have reliably voted for conservative parties for generations. In 2015 the NDP did win several northern seats and could regain them with a vision of stability and a good ground game. But it’ll be tough—whipped-up fear of vaccines and an oil and gas “transition” have inflamed polarization.

Lesser Slave Lake: Poor UCP representation signals a close election

Main candidates in 2023:

– NDP: Danielle Larivee is a public health nurse and First Vice-president of the United Nurses of Alberta. She was a cabinet minister, 2015-2019.

– UCP: Scott Sinclair owns an auto glass shop in Sherwood Park. He grew up in Slave Lake and played junior hockey.

“Our communities have really suffered from poor representation since 2019,” said Lesser Slave Lake NDP candidate Danielle Larivee when nominated to run in the upcoming election. Larivee won the riding in 2015 with 43.2 per cent of the vote. The UCP’s Pat Rehn won the seat in 2019, garnering 57.7 per cent. Rehn served a turbulent term in which he vacationed in Mexico at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and spent so little time in the riding that the mayor and all six councillors in Slave Lake publicly called on him to resign. Former premier Jason Kenney kicked Rehn out of the UCP caucus in January 2021 but reinstated him six months later. Rehn is not running for re-election in 2023.

That Rehn was a poor MLA is a point of agreement between the NDP and the UCP. Rehn’s former constituency office manager, Martine Carifelle, ran for the UCP nomination, telling the local paper that while serving under Rehn she “came to believe people were not getting the representation they deserved.” Another candidate, Scott Sinclair, said he was running “to restore trust in our community’s Member of the Legislative Assembly.” Sinclair won the race over Carifelle by five votes.

The largely rural riding has two municipalities—Slave Lake and High Prairie—11 First Nations and three Métis settlements. Nearly 56 per cent of the population is either First Nations, Métis or Inuit, making it Alberta’s only constituency where a majority of the population is Indigenous. Pearl Calahasen, the first Métis woman elected as an MLA in Alberta, won seven elections here for the Progressive Conservatives, holding the sprawling north-central seat from 1989 to 2015.

In 2023 the riding is one of the few in the north that is up for grabs; poll aggregator 338 has the NDP only a few percentage points behind the UCP. For the NDP’s Larivee, a nurse in Slave Lake, healthcare and economic issues are top of mind. “How do we make sure people in this community have the jobs they need to take care of their families?” she asks. “And how do we ensure we continue to have strong communities?”

Central Peace-Notley: Convoy politics cloud rural issues

Main candidates in 2023:

– NDP: Megan Ciurysek is an analyst for the public sector in northern Alberta.

– Alberta Party: Lynn Lekisch is an environmental scientist from Fairview.

– UCP: Todd Loewen is the Minister of Forestry, Parks and Tourism.

From Fox Creek to Fairview and the BC boundary, this vast riding encompasses six rural municipalities, several towns and a lot of boreal forest. All three main candidates in 2023 grew up on farms in the region, and rural concerns dominate this race—in different ways. A policy analyst, Megan Ciurysek acknowledges “the unique challenges rural Albertans face” and advocates for “quality healthcare, long-term job growth and opportunities, maternity and emergency care, and a competent government steering the ship.” Todd Loewen, who joined the “Freedom Convoy” to Ottawa after he was kicked out of Jason Kenney’s UCP caucus for opposing vaccine mandates, is calling for a “volunteer citizen corps” to help police fight rural crime. “It would not be an avenue for vigilante justice,” he assured the legislature. “We want volunteers to assist police in getting the bad guys behind bars.”

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