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Ordinary Albertans would be forgiven for not knowing what to believe.

Further fuzzying matters was Pollara’s declaration that its figure on separation was “the highest recorded by the company” since 2021. But even this surging support for Alberta separation was dwarfed by the Leger poll. And then Abacus flatly declared “Support for separation is low.” Its report concluded: “There is not a widespread appetite among the public for such a significant constitutional rupture.”

Polling—also called surveying—takes many different forms, and in Alberta this year we’ll see poll numbers touted by separatists, and other numbers cited by their federalist opponents. With so much on the line, how useful is polling for providing accurate insights into what people want?

Public opinion polling started in Canada during the 1940s. The first national poll was conducted by the Liberal Party in 1942 to try to determine the likely outcome of a plebiscite on conscription. The first election poll was done by the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion in 1945. The first political poll—used to help craft a party’s electoral strategy—was by the Quebec Liberals in 1959. Yet only since the 1980s have national polls been conducted regularly. Polling of public opinion at the provincial level is now routine as well.

Sometimes polling itself becomes the story. For example, during Alberta’s 2012 election, most pollsters projected a win by the Wildrose, led by Danielle Smith. As it turned out, the Progressive Conservatives under Alison Redford were the victors by a comfortable margin. “Clearly something’s wrong,” pollster Bruce Cameron told the CBC afterward. “I’m concerned about the impact on the credibility of the profession.”

Similarly, the 2017 civic election in Calgary was marked by conflicting polls, one of which suggested incumbent mayor Naheed Nenshi was losing badly. A post-election investigation by the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA) noted that “accurate public opinion polling can provide voters with information about the views of their fellow citizens [and] draw voters’ attention to particular candidates and issues.” It found that several polls by Mainstreet Research, commissioned by Postmedia, had been “seriously, methodologically flawed” and had “significantly affected the course of the campaign,” including by throwing Nenshi on the defensive and dooming the third-place candidate’s campaign.

The chief differences in polling techniques can be categorized according to the how (methodology) and the what (the content of the questions).

The “how” of polling constantly evolves. In his history of polling in Canada, Christopher Adams suggests polling had several precursors, including censuses, the first of which was conducted in 1666 by the intendant of New France. Another precursor is the market survey. In 1929, for example, the Canadian Business Research Bureau interviewed thousands of users of various products to learn what they “actually think and know about the goods.” Over time, market research acquired the sheen of academic rigour. W.W. Goforth, who taught economics at McGill, was hired by the ad agency Cockfield, Brown & Co. in 1928. In this early period, data-gathering included face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews and mail-in surveys.

The possibility of polling errors became apparent even in those early days. In 1919 the Winnipeg Free Press asked readers to complete a questionnaire about cars and accessories and mail it back. Questions included “How much have you spent for accessories [since the car purchase]?” Bertram Brooker, an ad executive, wrote in Marketing and Business Management in 1924 that surveys of this sort presented many problems, including an inability to control the sample size and to screen respondents. This survey, for example, failed to screen people who didn’t own or regularly use their car.

A major development in polling in the 21st century has been the decline in telephone surveys and the rise of the online variety. Canada’s Angus Reid Institute, for example, conducts all of its surveys and studies through the internet, citing a Pew Research study showing that response rates for phone interviews had dropped to only 6 per cent in 2018.

One pollster that remains attached to telephone surveying is Janet Brown. The company she uses, Trend Research, is based out of Edmonton. “The secret sauce is Albertans calling Albertans,” says Brown. She uses cell numbers and landlines, and says people are more inclined to stay on the line—or pick up in the first place—if they believe they’re talking to someone in Edmonton rather than in Montreal or outside Canada entirely. The company makes five attempts to reach a person before giving up.

The MRIA report on Calgary’s misleading polls in 2017 singled out Mainstreet for not calling enough cell phones, thus ignoring younger voters and creating an unrepresentative sample.

Frank Graves, founder and president of EKOS Research, however, isn’t as sold on telephone polling. “There is a tendency to overemphasize the importance of the mode of contact,” he says. “Whether or not you call someone, email them, do an intercept survey in the street or in their home—they all have different strengths and weaknesses.”

What Brown, MRIA and Graves would agree on, however, is that good polling requires a representative sample. This means, as the Pew Research Centre puts it, that any sample is “assumed to be representative of the larger population on any question we might be interested in.” Pollsters use various techniques to improve the reliability of a sample. One is weighting, or adjusting the relative contribution of respondents. People who participate in polls don’t necessarily reflect the general population. For example, they’re more likely to have a postsecondary degree. The pollster’s answer to this problem is to “weight down” the responses of postsecondary graduates in their final results.

Brown argues that polling in Alberta tends to underestimate the conservative vote and overestimate the progressive one. “Pollsters make the same mistakes over and over again,” she told the CBC in November 2020. It’s a message she reiterated to Alberta Views. Her theory is that progressive Albertans are more likely to participate in polls and that it takes strenuous attempts to reach more-conservative voters—by phone—to correct for this bias. “I sometimes joke that progressive people will tell you their opinions all day long,” she says. “Conservatives are a little bit more cautious, a little bit more reticent, and don’t want to be probed as much.”

Members of the public are sometimes invited to participate in opinion surveying. Once recruited, they’re part of what’s called a “panel”—a cohort asked to respond to survey questions. The most reliable panels are selected through probability-based sampling; the very best kind—online or offline—are those in which respondents are chosen at random. To do that perfectly would require a comprehensive list of the entire population or at least the target population. But such lists aren’t usually available, so pollsters use a variety of probability-based techniques to try to ensure that their samples (their panels) are constituted in such a way as to minimize sampling error.

It is important to distinguish between probability-based panels and opt-in samples. “Opt-in” means the respondents weren’t chosen at random; rather, they were invited to participate. The Pew Research Centre has concluded that opt-in sampling is only half as accurate as probability-based panels. However, opt-in sampling can be conducted in such a way as to improve its reliability. Canada’s Angus Reid Forum is an online panel composed of people selected through online ads on numerous, diverse websites. The company claims its panels “reflect the general population by continually verifying and recruiting so that the socio-demographic characteristics of each sampling region match actual sub-populations according to both the census and electoral data.”

Polling is, of course, ultimately about the answers to the questions—the what. Questions can be asked in numerous ways, including as neutrally as possible. Or questions can be selective, or leading, or presented in a specific order if a certain result is desired. Sometimes this takes the form of what is called “push polling.”

This is what the provincial government’s Alberta Next Panel has been accused of. In early 2025 Albertans were invited by the government to give their opinions, ostensibly to help the government choose its policies. A St. Albert Gazette editorial in August 2025 argued the surveying conducted through the Alberta Next website was more accurately described as push polling. “You can frame the questions in such a way that every answer is a version of your view, or [the questions] simply don’t include any option to oppose that view,” wrote Gazette staff.

The Alberta Next website, for example, offered ideas on “how to strengthen our sovereignty,” including ending equalization, creating an Alberta Pension Plan, forming a provincial police force, and withholding social services from immigrants. University of Calgary political science professor Lisa Young said, “The subject matter of the Alberta Next questions and videos are very much informed by the groups that we might call the UCP base.” The survey itself, which closed October 10, purported merely to consult Albertans.

On the topic of immigration, however, respondents (whether online or at the town halls) were required to first watch a short video, then were asked “Should Alberta take more control of the immigration system to counter Ottawa’s open-borders policies?” They were then presented with the following statement: “Ottawa approved 1.2 million people under the permanent and temporary immigrant streams in 2024. This is four times more than was approved in 2014 under prime minister Stephen Harper.”

Finally, respondents were asked to choose from three options:

• Far too much—immigration should be brought down [to] under 2014 levels;
• Definitely too high, and immigration needs to be brought down to 2014 levels again;
• Acceptable—I have no issue with immigration levels being this high.

Given this context, respondents’ answers were a foregone conclusion.

As of late November, none of the Alberta Next survey results had been released to the public. But premier Smith says she’ll use those results to assess which proposals will move to a referendum and which her government will legislate directly.

A investigation in 2017 found several polls in Calgary had been “seriously, methodologically flawed.”

Polling on support for Alberta political parties is conducted regularly. For those that pay for it, Janet Brown and journalist Paul McLoughlin release the monthly “Wild Ride” update, showing, e.g., how the UCP and NDP are faring. Accompanying charts track party support over time.

Polling such as this is sometimes criticized for its oversized impact on public discourse. For example, a poll by Brown in the late stage of the 2023 campaign, which contradicted other polls by showing the UCP ahead in Calgary, was leaked to the press. As political commentator David Climenhaga wrote, “This [survey] does change the narrative of the last two weeks of the election campaign—and that’s why it was leaked.”

Episodes like this colour the public perception of polling. “If you took a public opinion poll about polls, odds are that a majority would offer some rather unfavorable views of pollsters and the uses to which their work is put,” wrote E.J. Dionne Jr. and Thomas E. Mann for the Brookings Institution. The authors add that “public opinion is an illusive commodity.” Not all polls are created equal. Some are well constructed and designed to be credible; some are not. Some polls do seem to push people to give the answer that those who commissioned the polls want.

This is arguably what Brown herself did when she found support for a potential provincial pension plan. The poll, commissioned by the Smith government and conducted in April and May of 2025, asked Albertans how they would vote in a referendum on a variety of proposals, including “Replacing the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) with an Alberta Pension Plan (APP) that guaranteed all Alberta seniors the same or better benefits than the Canada Pension Plan.” Fifty-five per cent of respondents said they’d vote for the APP, while 45 per cent said they’d vote against it. But as CBC journalist Jason Markusoff noted, the question added a new nuance to the previous binary of CPP vs. APP. It posited a “guarantee of no financial risk for pensioners,” he wrote, “an assurance that could depend largely on how much of the total CPP pie Alberta would get as its starting pot, a figure that remains in dispute.” Who wouldn’t prefer something with no downside?

Whether using leading questions or not, polling has an effect on its audience. “There are concerns that inaccurate voting intention polling has a negative impact on the conduct of elections due to its influence on voters, the media and political parties,” concluded the Select Committee on Political Polling and Digital Media, struck by the UK’s House of Lords. The committee was a response to three consecutive cases of polling getting it wrong during critical moments: the UK’s 2015 and 2017 general elections and the 2016 vote on leaving the European Union—the infamous Brexit referendum.

The committee noted a number of theories on how polling results impact voters. One of these is the “bandwagon effect,” in which people get on board with an idea because they see many other people doing the same. The obverse of this is the “underdog effect,” which can encourage people to “adopt a minority view out of sympathy.” Polling can also affect voter turnout. Academics showed the committee evidence “that turnout is higher in elections that are anticipated to be close.” Conversely, if a poll tells someone that their candidate is losing badly, they might not bother voting at all.

So what do we really know about support for Alberta separation In an interview with Alberta Views, Dennis Modry, the founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), which is leading the separatist charge, says his movement enjoys a “plurality” of support, meaning that more Albertans want to separate from Canada than remain undecided or want to stay in Canada. And he argues polling underestimates separatist support. “We still live in an era of cancel culture,” he says. “Oftentimes, people won’t respond to a question that they perceive as possibly controversial or that has any risk of cancelling them in any way.”

A further wrinkle is that not all polling companies are created the same. Cardinal Research, for example, released a poll in October 2025 suggesting that 11 per cent of decided voters in Alberta support the new provincial Republican Party. It was the first poll to show significant support for the separatist Republicans; CBC polls analyst Éric Grenier called it “a bit of a jaw-dropper.” But a Toronto Star story noted that Cameron Davies, leader of the Republican Party, had until recently been a part-owner of Cardinal Research. Until the Star story came out, media coverage omitted that potential bias. The Lethbridge Herald quoted Davies: “What [the poll] shows is our message is resonating with Albertans; we’re getting out there, we’re doing the work.”

The Canadian Research Insights Council (CRIC), which represents pollsters, cautions that the publication of political-poll results “carries with it the potential for great consequence,” including the risk of misleading voters or eroding public trust. The council asks that journalists, before publishing a poll’s results, consider how questions were phrased, sample sizes and margins of error. It also asks “Who’s the sponsor, and what’s their interest in the topic?” CRIC quotes a former US network TV director: “When assessing whether to publish the results of a poll, media need to apply the same degree of journalistic critical practices and skepticism that they would to any other source of information.”

One of Modry’s main adversaries, Thomas Lukaszuk, leader of the Forever Canadian campaign, believes support for Alberta separatism is much more modest. “I think it’s fair to say approximately 10 per cent of Albertans are 100 per cent determined to separate from Canada,” he says. Lukaszuk’s impression is based in part on months of collecting signatures from hundreds of thousands of “pro-remain” Albertans. Meanwhile, he believes separatists themselves are divided. “That 10 per cent is further subdivided between those who’d like to join the US [and] those who somehow envision forming a new country.”

Polling conducted by Janet Brown, commissioned by CBC, has offered a more nuanced picture. In her survey of 1,200 random Albertans, conducted in May 2025, 22 per cent of respondents identified as “committed separatists.” Her survey suggests that a further 14 per cent identify as “soft separatists”—frustrated, perhaps, but not especially keen to leave Canada. They tend to approve of premier Smith’s attempt to forge a new relationship with Ottawa.

A deeper dive into Brown’s polling data offers further insights. John Santos, Brown’s data scientist, explained: “Of those who are ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ confident in their ability to save for retirement, 36 per cent would vote for separation; conversely, only 22 per cent of those who are ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ confident in their ability to save for retirement would vote for separation. This is very much an issue of financial security.”

This survey and others suggest the drivers of separatism in Alberta aren’t cultural or linguistic as in Quebec. They’re economic. The U of C’s Lisa Young argues separatists believe “Canada has stood in the way of Alberta’s prosperity because of [federal] environmental regulations.” Lukaszuk observed something similar: “We found that cities, towns and other areas that are very much reliant on the oil and gas servicing industry tend to be more pro-separatist.”

Frank Graves of EKOS suggests that surveys on Alberta separatism are being swayed by misinformation. He shared with Alberta Views preliminary results of polling he conducted on behalf of the labour movement. “The level of misinformation in Alberta is the highest in the country,” he says. In polling on the role of false information in Alberta politics, EKOS asked a number of screening questions. Respondents were asked whether certain statements were true or false. For example: “Deaths due to COVID-19 vaccines are being intentionally hidden by the government.” This process helped EKOS identify respondents that have been swayed by falsehoods. Graves believes that susceptibility to misinformation is the most “powerful predictor” of support for separating.

Not all polls are created equal. Some seem to push people to answer questions a certain way.

So, what ultimately explains the difference between Pollara’s 24 per cent, Leger’s 41 per cent and Abacus’s 18 per cent support for Alberta separatism Perhaps subtle changes in the wording:

“If a referendum were held on your province’s sovereignty, would you vote FOR or AGAINST?” (Pollara)

“If a provincial referendum were held tomorrow on whether or not your province should separate from Canada to form its own country, how would you most likely vote?” (Leger)

“Do you agree that the province of Alberta shall become a sovereign country and cease to be a province of Canada?” (Abacus)

Leger gave respondents the option of “strong support” or “somewhat support,” then combined these to show “support for separating.” Pollara’s choice was starker: “Stay or separate?” And Abacus seemed to be asking for a prediction. The questioners had different sample sizes, weighting strategies and survey methods. One survey prompted respondents with a question about Liberal leader Mark Carney; another prefaced its survey by asking how closely respondents have been following the news. Respondents may have been influenced by the looming federal election, or by financial insecurity, or by misinformation, or even by other surveys they’d seen.

For his part, Graves didn’t want to speculate on the differences. “If I were doing this,” he says, “I’d do random control assignment testing. A random portion is assigned to version A of the question, and the other is assigned to version B.” This would be the only way to determine whether or not the way the question was asked had a bearing on the result.

Many more such surveys will be released this year. The stakes are high—Albertans could soon face a separation referendum. And the ultimate poll will come at the ballot box.

Illustration by Gerry Rasmussen

Laurence Miall lives in Edmonton. He has written for Jacobin, the CBC and Alberta Views, and is a former editor of carte blanche.

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To this Danielle Smith added: “I assure you, so do I.”

She wasn’t silent for long. In fact, the day before Smith quit the radio, she announced her new account at locals.com, a libertarian videoblogging site, where she could resume speaking her truth, only this time directly to an audience of paying subscribers and free from repercussions from boss, advertiser or mob. At least one freelance journalist paid for full access to Smith’s content. This is how non-subscribers could learn, for example, that Smith decorates her High River home office with the US revolutionary Gadsden Flag, a coiling rattlesnake—“Don’t Tread on Me”—said to represent the individual standing up to unjust authority. Snippets of Smith’s more controversial videos (on COVID, vaccines, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) began circulating on social media.

The municipal realm is “the healthiest level of government.” Smith, 2022

But on May 13, 2022, a year into her newfound freedom, Danielle Smith said something on locals.com that a great many Albertans would agree with. Sitting at her desk, wearing a grey blazer, she first read aloud a subscriber’s two-part question: “What are your thoughts on other electoral systems Do you think there’s one best suited to represent the views of most Albertans?”

“You know,” Smith began, “my leading contender, if you want the truth, would probably be… Nunavut’s system, or the [one] you see in a lot of rural municipalities in Alberta.

“You get elected as an independent, based on your own steam. You get elected based on who you are, what you stand for. You’re not tied by some kind of partisan restriction. You don’t have some leader who can decide to punish you. You don’t have some leader who can decide not to sign your nomination papers.” (Here Smith chuckled; she was by May 2022 trying to re-enter politics by seeking a UCP nomination, and needed leader Jason Kenney’s blessing.)

“So… you’re removing the partisan labels and you’re just choosing the best person for the job,” she said. “I know—what a concept…! I think maybe we’re too polarized now. [But] when you look at the municipal level of government, it’s kind of the healthiest level of government.”

Her opinion was uncontroversial then. It’s notable now. Because just two days after praising non-partisan politics, Smith’s life again turned upside down when UCP members ousted Kenney. Smith dropped her UCP nomination bid. She leapt into the leadership race. She won. Eight months later she led her UCP to a general election win. And then premier Smith injected a heavy dose of partisanship into Alberta’s healthiest level of government.

A Janet Brown poll found that two in three Albertans want municipal candidates to be independent.

In October 2022, in just her third week as premier, Smith used a Calgary Sun columnist to float a trial balloon. She was being lobbied to legislate municipal parties, she said. “Calgary wants it, and Edmonton wants it too. There seems to be an appetite for it.” The Edmonton Journal later reported that third-party advertiser Take Back Alberta (TBA) was in fact behind the push.

Smith owes TBA. The group infiltrated the UCP—in leader David Parker’s words, “declaring war on Jason Kenney”—and orchestrated the premier’s removal through a leadership review. Its support was critical to Smith’s subsequent party leadership win. But the policy document that emerged from the UCP’s late-October AGM, Smith’s first convention as leader, at which TBA supporters dominated policy discussions, was silent on municipal parties. So too was the UCP platform during the spring 2023 election campaign.

By fall 2023, however, Smith said she was serious about bringing in municipal parties. Local politicians were angry. Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek called it “the kiss of death for local representation.” Red Deer mayor Ken Johnson called the idea a “poor move,” saying cities should be “unfettered by party or partisan politics.” Cathy Heron, president of Alberta Municipalities, said partisan politics creates “votes along party lines or the party thought process. And so it doesn’t lead to good governance of a municipality.”

The sentiment went beyond politicians. “This is a terrible idea, and the public knows it,” Edmonton Journal reporter Keith Gerein tweeted. “Albertans don’t want it, the UCP didn’t campaign on it—but hey, why let those factors get in the way?” Said Andrew Knack, former Edmonton ward Nakota Isga councillor and current mayoral candidate, “If you’re looking at the provincial or the federal systems, that partisan system that’s set up, how many Albertans would really look at that and say, ‘Yeah, I want more of that municipally?’”

A Janet Brown poll in September 2023 found that two in three Albertans (68 per cent) want municipal candidates to be independent. Only one in four (24 per cent) want parties. Fully 81 per cent say their main concern is councillors “who are part of a political party would vote along party lines, and not necessarily in the best interest of the community.” Most (69 per cent) agree “parties would make municipal governments more divisive and less effective.”

Premier Smith commissioned her own survey that November. The results, published in late January 2024 in the Edmonton Journal—after that paper filed a freedom of information request—showed that more than 70 per cent of respondents were opposed to seeing parties on local ballots.

By this point Smith was back on the radio, on a Saturday-morning province-wide call-in show co-broadcast by 770 CHQR and 880 CHED. On the February 24, 2024, edition of “Your Province, Your Premier,” she said parties would now be legislated only in Alberta’s two biggest cities. The rationale was no longer that Edmonton and Calgary were asking for the change; it was that those cities’ elected representatives weren’t truly independent. “The smaller the municipality, I don’t know that they’re as partisan,” she said. “But when you get into a city the size of Calgary or Edmonton, you better believe it’s partisan.” The solution to this lack of independence, she suggested, was to tether councillors and mayors to parties, thus creating “more transparency.”

Her government introduced the Municipal Affairs Statutes Amendment Act, 2024, that spring. It defined municipal parties, which can’t be formally affiliated with provincial or federal parties, and created them in time for October 2025’s civic elections. The bill passed in fall 2024 with all UCP MLAs in favour and all NDP MLAs against. Said then-municipal affairs minister Ric McIver, parties will ensure councils “make decisions that are clearly in Alberta’s interest and reflect the transparency and fairness the citizens of Alberta deserve.”

If citizens deserve better, Smith’s prescription is tough to swallow. Since the time of Plato, people have been wary of their fellows who seek power. Trustworthiness surveys today rank politicians last, below even car salespeople and ad executives. A cottage industry of articles and books explores the “unique narcissism” of politicians. MPs and MLAs call their colleagues liars, incompetent, “a colossal piece of shit” or worse, and dismiss the parliaments and legislatures they themselves serve in as “daycares” and “kindergartens.”

But parties earn special contempt. An Environics study measuring trust in political institutions from 2010 to 2023 found that while 35–41 per cent of Canadians express “a lot” of pride in our political system, only 6–17 per cent have the same level of support for parties. The municipal realm performs at least twice as well as partisan politics, with “a lot of support” ranging from 16 to 31 per cent. (Other than Montreal and three cities in BC, most Canadian cities don’t have parties.)

In 2019 Angus Reid found that nearly two-thirds of Canadians say politicians can’t be trusted. One-third of Canadians believe politicians are primarily motivated by “personal gain” rather than a genuine desire to serve their communities. Forty per cent say the problem is getting worse. Again municipal politicians performed better, perhaps because most don’t belong to parties.

Clips from the House of Commons and legislatures confirm the public’s suspicions. Grownups in suits shout at grownups in suits, or heckle, jeer and bang on desks—behaviour that in a normal workplace would get you fired. Ads show grainy photos of party leaders at their worst (scowling, shrugging, sweaty) with circus music and out of context quotes. Party bots send frothy text messages as much to harvest respondents’ data as to influence voters. (In the 2025 campaign a Conservative “flash survey” gave as one of respondents’ two options on crime policy: “I want dangerous criminals terrorizing my streets.”) Once elected, parties often appoint their own donors and one-time candidates to “non-partisan” positions on public boards and commissions and pay them to write “independent” public reports.

Even the “healthiest level of government” isn’t perfect. But lacking party loyalties and machinery, civic politics doesn’t stoop to the blood sport and cronyism of federal or provincial politics. Organizations that seek more diverse political representation in Canada say the potential for collaboration and civil disagreement at city hall—and less need of powerful connections to get elected in the first place—is why newcomers or members of under-represented groups considering a run for office often prefer the municipal level.

This may already be changing. “I entered [politics] with an expectation that teamwork would win the day and that city hall would be a space for practical problem-solving and dialogue,” said Evan Spencer, Ward 12 councillor, in a February 2025 Calgary Herald column. “After all, municipalities are responsible for delivering essential services—transit, infrastructure, community safety—without the partisan baggage that dominates higher levels of government.”

“Or at least,” Spencer wrote, “that’s how it should be. Unfortunately, the political climate has shifted dramatically… Municipal councils are succumbing to the pressures of party politics. This transformation threatens the very foundation of local democracy. Party politics, by its nature, demands loyalty to a platform, a leader and a base of supporters. This dynamic creates an environment where councillors are pressured to vote along ideological lines rather than engage in the give-and-take necessary for effective governance.” After one term, Spencer isn’t running again.

The problem of elected representatives prioritizing their party over the people who elected them sometimes erupts to the surface.

In May 2015 junior-high teacher Robyn Luff was elected for the provincial NDP in Calgary-East. Here, in working-class Dover, Forest Lawn and Penbrooke Meadows, incomes are $9,000 below the provincial average and the percentage of renters is 30 per cent higher. Rents in Alberta back then were rising at three times the inflation rate, and nothing stopped a landlord from hiking the rent as much as they liked. Luff’s constituents wanted a limit—and a modest rent cap was in the NDP platform in late 2014. Rachel Notley called premier Jim Prentice’s notion that the market could deal with a housing affordability crisis “profoundly irresponsible.”

But by the following summer, after the NDP had toppled the PCs, rent caps were off the table. Said municipal affairs minister Deron Bilous, “Quite frankly… our government is not at this time looking to rent controls.” An undeterred Luff brought forward a private member’s bill in 2016 that included a proposed 2 per cent cap. The premier’s office told Luff to water it down. The bill was sent to committee, where it languished.

Two years later Luff was kicked out of caucus. The NDP said she didn’t understand party discipline. Luff said she wasn’t being allowed to represent her constituents. “Every power that MLAs are supposed to have has been taken away,” she said in a statement. “MLAs must vote at the direction of the leader at all times [a.k.a. whipped votes]. Questions from private members are written by ministries and given to them to ask… Decisions about who speaks in the House and to what bill are all made ahead of time by party leadership. Statements and questions at committee are all highly scripted and agreed upon ahead of time. If MLAs should choose to go against any of these directives, there’s a fear they’ll lose privileges …they’ll be isolated, their political career will be finished, their nomination papers will not be signed.”

Luff said stifling MLAs “leads to hyperpartisan rhetoric and to no actual debate on bills. Everything that happens in the House is predetermined, rendering everything that happens there to nothing more than a vehicle for scoring partisan points.… This is a mockery of representation and a tragedy of democracy.”

That MLAs are powerless, votes are whipped and messages tightly controlled is “modus operandi” for all parties, Mount Royal University professor Duane Bratt told the CBC. “Everything [Luff] described… sounded like traditional party behaviour.”

Stifling MLAs “leads to hyperpartisan rhetoric and no actual debate… a mockery of representation.”

More recently, Lesser Slave Lake MLA Scott Sinclair and Airdrie-Cochrane MLA Pete Guthrie said their UCP colleagues were prioritizing party interests over the public good. Sinclair refused to support the 2025 budget because it has little for healthcare and highway improvements in his riding but does have $183-million to help the Edmonton Oilers. He was kicked out of caucus. Guthrie said premier Smith had “deliberately” misled caucus about procurement issues at AHS, where reportedly over $600-million in public contracts were given to a UCP donor. He was kicked out a month after Sinclair. “Competent, honest governance has taken a backseat to political manoeuvrings that jeopardize the best interest of Albertans,” wrote Guthrie.

None of this is new. Edmonton-Meadowlark MLA Maurice Tougas, in the May 2009 edition of Alberta Views, described the legislature as badly scripted theatre. “Very early on in my term, I came to the realization that it hardly mattered what was said… 90 per cent of what was said in the Legislature was irrelevant.” Brent Rathgeber, a St. Albert MP who in 2013 quit the Conservatives to sit as an independent, said prime minister Stephen Harper’s staff would pressure caucus to obey talking points and vote “like trained seals.” With backbenchers tightly scripted, he said, “MPs don’t represent their constituents in Ottawa, they represent the government to their constituents.”

Since 2008, the Ontario-based Samara Centre for Democracy has conducted exit interviews with 160 MPs from across the political spectrum. In the book Tragedy of the Commons, MPs describe to Samara the fealty of party politics. “Almost without fail,” the interviewers write, “each MP describes the tremendous influence of their political party. From the manipulation of the nomination process to enforced voting in the House and in committees, the unseen hand of the party dominates every aspect of the MP’s existence.”

When Smith in 2024 brought in legislation to add parties to municipal politics, Robyn Luff tweeted: “The literal best thing about municipal politics in Alberta is that there are no political parties.”

In politics, language that conveys a specific message to one group and a different one to the wider public is called a “dog whistle,” named for the ultrasonic tool that’s inaudible to people but heard by their pets. Smith is telling us she doesn’t much like party politics; all she wants is to create “transparency.”

But that’s the dog whistle. “Transparency,” to the Albertans who wanted municipal parties, evidently means something different: We want more conservatives to get elected.

Alberta’s reputation as a conservative monoculture stems from the provincial PCs’ 44-year reign and from federal politics, where, over the dozen elections before 2025, 94 per cent of seats were won by Conservatives or Reformers. But our cities produce much more diverse representation. Progressive mayors Jan Reimer and Don Iveson in Edmonton, and Dave Bronconnier, Al Duerr and Naheed Nenshi in Calgary, served multiple terms. Prominent conservatives such as Calgary’s McIver (in 2010) and Edmonton’s Kerry Diotte (in 2013) failed in their mayoral bids. Progressives such as Brian Mason, Linda Sloan, Karen Leibovici, Bob Hawkesworth and Joe Ceci went on from city politics to win provincial seats for the NDP or the Liberals.

That the same Albertan might vote for a Conservative federally, the NDP provincially and for Iveson or Nenshi municipally shouldn’t be impossible to fathom. Different levels of government face different challenges and have unique responsibilities. And municipal issues are thought to be less ideological. As former New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia said: “There’s no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage.”

But in October 2021 high-profile conservatives in Alberta’s biggest
cities were trounced. In Calgary, mayor Gondek soundly defeated Jeromy Farkas, a former Manning Centre fellow. In Edmonton Amarjeet Sohi beat one-time UCP nominee Mike Nickel by 20 percentage points. A CTV reporter put a fine point on things: “Alberta’s two largest cities are now led by progressive people of colour.”

The results especially grated on conservatives who feel entitled to win every election in Alberta. The creation of municipal parties could fix this “mistake” of municipal politics. Calgary Herald columnist Rob Breakenridge: “It seems obvious that this is about stacking the deck in support of like-minded candidates in two cities where conservatives have often been on the losing end,” he wrote in April 2024. “Provincial and federal conservatives tend to fare much better, and that’s not lost on this government. There is, of course, the added bonus of potentially dealing with more-pliant city councils.”

Calgary Ward 13’s Dan McLean was one of the few councillors to openly embrace parties. He’s also a special breed of partisan, tweeting that if the Liberals won the 2025 election, “Canada will be invaded by the US.” He’s running for A Better Calgary (ABC), the city’s first party. McLean predicts more conservatives will now get elected in cities where otherwise “far-left” candidates hide their agendas and “common sense” right-wingers split the vote. “I feel like the majority when I walk out the doors,” he told the Calgary Sun. “[But] when I’m at city hall it’s all, like, ‘We’re doing the right things’ and ‘We’re saving the planet.’ With political parties, you’d have to identify who you are and what policies you stand by.”

But proponents of municipal parties may be missing a larger point. Danielle Smith, for example, when she re-emerged from the political wilderness in 2022, said she knew what she’d done wrong. “What I learned,” she told reporters, “is that a party doesn’t belong to its leader—a party belongs to its members.” But arguably a party doesn’t belong to its leader or its members but to its voters.

University of Waterloo political scientist Emmett Macfarlane writes in a 2025 Substack essay that Canadian parties have been gradually giving less power to delegates, MLAs or MPs to elect their leaders and more to individual party members. But despite seeming “more democratic,” the move has “come at the significant expense of further disempowering… [the] elected MPs whose primary job in Parliament is to hold governments to account.”

“By establishing a direct link between the leader and party members,” Macfarlane writes, “leaders assume an effective mandate not from their caucus [e.g., MPs elected under the same party banner]—people elected by millions of Canadians—but from a relatively tiny proportion of the Canadian population. For example, Justin Trudeau won the Liberal leadership in 2013 with 81,389 member votes. By contrast, 5,556,629 Canadian voters selected Liberal candidates to represent them in Parliament. The democratic legitimacy of the Liberal caucus as a whole far outweighs the democratic legitimacy of the party leader.”

Voters, Macfarlane admits, are often more attuned to leaders than to local candidates. “But when we ignore how our democratic institutions are designed and how our representative democracy is intended to operate, we see why problems like excessive concentration of power in the hands of the prime minister prevail, and why aspects of it have gotten worse.”

The end of independent councillors will embolden Take Back Alberta and empower party donors.

Smith herself has argued as much, writing in 2010 in Policy Options: “MLAs don’t work for their leader or their party; they work for the people of the constituency they represent, and more generally for the people of Alberta.”

But Smith’s creation of municipal parties siphons power away from the people of Edmonton and Calgary. Many local candidates are now beholden to parties, to party leaders and to opaque nomination processes. The shift away from independent civic councillors will empower party insiders and donors. It will embolden organizations such as TBA.

Indeed, all of this seems intentional. The same UCP legislation that enabled municipal parties brought corporate and union donations back into local elections (a change likewise not in the UCP’s 2023 election platform). These kinds of donations were banned from provincial politics by Alberta’s government in 2015, with the unanimous support of all MLAs. The donations were banned from municipal politics in 2018. Wildrose MLA Wayne Anderson that year told the legislature: “It’s important to keep special interests at bay when influencing [municipal] campaigning. The reality is that an individual cannot compete with a large union or corporation when they want the candidate’s ear. Under this legislation, local election candidates will only be able to accept donations from individuals, thus giving individual citizens more of a level playing field.”

Worse, under Smith’s new rules, donors can give to a candidate and to that candidate’s party. This essentially doubles the spending limit for party-aligned council and mayor candidates. “It puts local governments up for sale to the highest bidder,” Alberta Municipalities president Tyler Gandam told reporters. “Local elections will end up being about what influential [donors] want, not about what voters want. Independent candidates risk being outspent and drowned out by party candidates who enjoy the financial backing of corporations and unions. Who stands to benefit?”

In 2021 Jeromy Farkas did a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” (AMA). Farkas, as a councillor, was often seen as a universal naysayer. But in his AMA he said municipal politics produces more agreement than most people realize. “The reality is different from the soundbites,” he wrote. “I may not have agreed with council on issues like corporate welfare, the Olympic bid or the closed-door arena deal, but each time, I had the support of much of my constituency. I had to raise those issues, because that’s what my residents needed me to do. The media rarely portrays that I’ve worked closely with every other member of council to consistently deliver for my constituents—often with people you might think would be unlikely allies, such as councillor [Druh] Farrell and mayor Nenshi.” He gave as examples a city plan to remove lead pipes; support for a tool to help police find high-risk missing children; and funding for summer students.

Farkas lost that mayoral election. In a January 2023 interview with the Calgary Sun, he said it’s already hard for councillors to resist political pressure from parties. “We’re trained by the politicians and by the media that politics is tribal. If you’re on the red team, you have to always support the red team no matter what stupid things they do. The same thing goes for the orange team and the blue team. It’s even worse than that. It’s covering up the bad things your team does and turning a blind eye.”

Today Farkas is again running for mayor. He has chosen—as has Gondek—to run as an independent. Two party-aligned candidates are challenging them both. After Danielle Smith’s government brought in municipal parties, Farkas was asked by the Sprawl for his assessment of the idea. His reply: “Municipal parties at the city level—I think it’s cancer.”

Jonathan Haidt opened the book that Danielle Smith cited in her farewell-to-the-radio column with a quote from Rodney King: “Can we all get along?” King’s 1992 near-fatal beating by Los Angeles police precipitated five days of riots and 63 deaths. Haidt used these words deliberately, he wrote, because today so many people “are asking King’s question not about race relations but about political relations and the collapse of co-operation across party lines. Many Americans feel as though the nightly news from Washington is being sent to us from helicopters circling over the city, delivering dispatches from the war zone.”

Smith, the radio host who just wanted to have lively discussions about controversial ideas, said she endured vitriol and threats from the public and became overwhelmed by “extreme” political polarization. Scholarly research and polling back up her fears about the spread of polarization in Canada. Smith the online libertarian pundit then professed to admire above all other political models the “healthy” freedom from party straitjackets enjoyed by city councillors.

Smith the premier, however, stokes the flames of division.

In early 2025 Smith introduced legislation to make it much easier for Albertans to initiate a separation referendum. She admitted to CTV host Vassy Kapelos that the change was done to benefit her own party. “If there isn’t an outlet [for separatists], it creates a new party,” she said. A separatist splinter group, in other words, could do to Smith what her Wildrose once did to the Progressive Conservatives. Or it could do what TBA did to premier Kenney. It could send Smith back into political exile. Calgary Herald politics columnist Don Braid wrote, “Nobody expected the premier to reveal the raw cynicism behind her changes to referendum rules.”

One concern about polarization that Haidt foresaw is a growing threat of violence against politicians. Alberta isn’t immune to this. Rachel Notley, in her first two years as premier, reportedly received 11 credible death threats. In 2016 alone, 26 cases of “inappropriate contact and communication” involving the premier were sent to police. In 2022 MP Charlie Angus wrote in Policy magazine about federal politicians’ risk. “I can no longer count on my political ‘sixth sense’ when meeting people in public, because the conspiratorial mindset fed by disinformation doesn’t fit into a simple profile of age, class or demographic,” he wrote. “Parliament Hill security is advising elected officials to scope out public events before entering, to be briefed in advance on potential threats, and have an escape plan in case things go wrong.” That year, Canada’s MPs were issued panic buttons.

Haidt recalls that Rodney King, as he stumbled through his TV interview, choking back tears, said, “Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.” “This book,” Haidt wrote, “is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.”

Political disagreements are a part of life. But we don’t have to further divide ourselves into hostile groups. We don’t have to encourage the worst kind of politics. Danielle Smith knows this. Yet she chose to drag Edmonton’s and Calgary’s municipal councils away from their imperfect independent traditions and into the partisan muck.

Evan Osenton is editor of Alberta Views.

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Anita Nickerson says YES

Executive director of Fair Vote Canada, a multi-partisan movement for electoral reform

The most compelling reason to adopt proportional representation is that it’s fair to all citizens. With first-past-the-post (FPTP), majority governments can be elected with the support of only 39 per cent (or less) of voters. In a democracy, a party with a minority of voter support shouldn’t be able to wield 100 per cent of the power.

First-past-the-post is especially unfair to citizens who vote for smaller parties. In 2008 almost a million Canadians voted for the Green Party, which received zero seats. With almost the same number of votes, the Bloc Québécois saw 49 MPs elected.

FPTP also harms national unity. In 1993 the Bloc became Canada’s Official Opposition with a mere 13.5 per cent of the vote. This was ludicrous, considering the party advocates for Quebec seceding from Canada. At the provincial level, the separatist Parti Québécois could win a majority government in 2026 with 33 per cent of the vote.

First-past-the-post exaggerates regional tensions. Canadians aren’t as divided as FPTP suggests. A party can win every seat in a region even if a large minority of people living there voted for other parties. For years Conservatives didn’t have even one MP in Toronto, and Liberals didn’t have any in Alberta.

In 1979 the federal Task Force on Canadian Unity (Pepin–Robarts Commission) concluded that proportional representation was “urgent and of very high priority.” Since then our politics has become more polarized. Most alarming is how people increasingly see those with different political views as immoral or dangerous. This isn’t a healthy debate but a descent into “us” vs. “them,” increasing the risk of violence.

Experience in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries shows that proportional representation leads to more co-operative and less polarized politics. Almost every vote counts, giving everyone a reason to cast a ballot. Citizens are fairly represented in parliaments, and more points of view are considered, leading to more broadly accepted public policy. Local representation is strengthened. Voters in every region can elect MPs from the governing party and opposition parties alike as advocates. Cabinets can more easily include MPs from every region; no region need dominate or be excluded.

Proportional representation also acts as a crucial safeguard to prevent an extremist leader of a party with only minority support from gaining complete control.

Proportional representation has a strong track record. About 80 per cent of democracies in the OECD use such systems, including democracies ranked as the world’s strongest. These countries outperform ones with winner-take-all systems on economic growth, population health and environmental protection.

In short, proportional representation is fair, it works and it’s long overdue in Canada.

lydia miljan says no

Professor and head of political science at the University of Windsor

You must give proponents of proportional representation (PR) credit; they are relentless in their desire to change our electoral system despite the public repeatedly rejecting the proposition. Since 2005 Canada has had six provincial referenda asking citizens if they’d like to change how we vote. In all cases the majority didn’t want change or so few people cast ballots that there was no mandate for change. Additionally, both the federal and the Quebec governments have made highly publicized promises to change the electoral system, only to abandon them without offering any alternatives to the status quo.

Our current system, based on plurality, is colloquially known as first-past-the-post. The winning candidates receive the most votes in a constituency. Crucially they don’t need a majority of votes, just more than any other candidate. The fact that in many ridings the winner gets less than 50 per cent of the vote leads electoral reform advocates to complain that votes are “wasted” or results don’t reflect the popular vote.

The problem with this argument is that the metric often used is the total vote compared to the percentage of seats allocated in the House of Commons. While it’s true that not every riding is won with a majority, in some federal elections one-third to half of the electoral districts are won with at least 50 per cent of the vote. Over the last six federal elections roughly 40 per cent of ridings were won with a majority. In 2012 nearly half of Canada’s ridings (47 per cent) were won by candidates who earned a majority of the vote.

In Alberta elections it’s quite common that most seats are won with a majority of votes. In 2019, for example, the UCP won a majority in 53 of 87 ridings. In 2023 it got more than 50 per cent of the vote in 47 ridings. Rather than reveal a flaw in the electoral system, these outcomes demonstrate how vote share can be determined by effective party campaigns. They also reflect our geographical differences and allow us to guard against factions of the majority that live in cities, thus giving rural and remote communities their say in elections.

Canada’s multi-party parliaments are unusual. Duverger’s law argues that plurality systems like ours generally lead to two-party dominance. That Canada subsidizes smaller parties by issuing tax credits to their donors and reimbursing some party campaign expenses only increases the likelihood of fewer ridings being won with a majority vote.

In contrast, PR systems often see many more parties elected than typically win in Canada. This is in part because there’s less need for parties to compromise before elections, which creates the illusion of more choices for the electorate—an illusion because PR often leads to minority governments, which require post-election negotiations to form coalitions. Voters are excluded from these negotiations and have little say in the final composition of the government.

anita nickerson responds to lydia miljan

Lydia Miljan claims that advocates for proportional representation are “relentless,” and on that we agree. We are relentless in advocating for an electoral system grounded in fairness, in which 30 per cent of the vote gets a party 30 per cent of the seats. Every voter should matter, not just voters in a few swing ridings. We are relentless in support of a fundamental principle of fairness embraced by the world’s strongest democracies.

The principle of proportional representation is also supported by a strong majority of Canadians. A 2025 EKOS poll showed that 68 per cent of Canadians agree with proportional representation and only 21 per cent oppose it, echoing national polls over the past 20 years.

Miljan points to a history of divisive and confusing provincial referendums as a reason that citizens should give up and walk away. These were referendums launched by politicians with dubious motives, plagued by partisanship and misinformation. Research from the OECD shows that countries that moved to proportional representation did so through multi-party agreement, where parties were willing to co-operate and compromise. Achieving proportional representation requires politicians to put their country first and show real political leadership.

Miljan points to the fact that in six consecutive elections, in about 40 per cent of ridings, the MP got more than half the popular vote—as if that shows the FPTP system is working. In fact, it speaks volumes about just how many voters are unrepresented. She misses the point of proportional representation, which is to make every vote count and to ensure that, overall, Parliament reflects how Canadians voted.

Whether an MP received 30 per cent, 40 per cent or even 60 per cent of the vote, the question remains: Who represents the other voters Why should one group of voters in a riding receive the representation of their choice while others get no voice in Parliament Canadians aren’t satisfied with a system where millions of votes have no impact, and where “majority” governments are formed with 39 per cent of the vote. Institutionalized minority rule that shuts out a majority of voters isn’t democratic.

Why should some voters in a riding receive the representation of their choice while others get no voice?

Miljan states that FPTP outcomes better reflect our geographical differences and give rural and remote communities their say. What FPTP actually does is grossly exaggerate our regional differences, making us appear more divided than we really are, pitting regions against each other and hastening another national unity crisis.

In the 2025 federal election Liberals won 23 of 24 ridings in Toronto (96 per cent of the seats) with just 58 per cent of the vote. Conservatives won 13 of 14 seats in Saskatchewan (93 per cent) with just 65 per cent of the vote. This wall of urban red vs. wall of rural blue is an outcome manufactured by our current electoral system, and it’s a recipe for alienation and polarization.

With proportional representation, seats in every region would reflect all of the people who live in that region, not just the biggest group. It would produce a kind of politics that aims at understanding one another, finding common ground and working together.

Miljan argues that Canada’s multi-party Parliament with FPTP is unusual because first-past-the-post typically shuts out smaller parties—as if achieving that is the ideal outcome. In the 2025 election, Canadians on the left and right flocked to the two biggest parties, motivated to block a party they opposed from winning a false majority. This two-party situation is where FPTP has taken us—but is it really where Canadians want to go A 2025 post-election poll showed that 63 per cent of Canadians think the country has never been more polarized. By a margin of two to one, Canadians think domination by two parties is bad for our democracy.

The US has become a flashing billboard for what can happen when a winner-take-all system reduces a country’s politics to two warring camps and where a single party or leader can be handed far too much power. For several years the Economist Intelligence Unit has been warning in their Democracy Index reports that Canada’s political problems, particularly rising levels of polarization, are beginning to resemble those of the US. By contrast, the most successful democracies use proportional representation and have multi-party systems. Stable majority coalitions are the most common government in the OECD. Finding solutions by collaborating with other parties is preferable to a single leader with a false majority being able to ram through legislation supported by a minority of voters while being abhorred by large parts of the country.

That’s why countries with PR outperform countries with winner-take-all systems on policy outcomes ranging from economic growth to population health. Parliaments elected this way are stable, representative and create policy that takes into account the views of more citizens.

lydia miljan responds to anita nickerson

In her argument for proportional representation, Anita Nickerson conflates how we vote with other factors that impact the vote. She presents several reasons why Canada should adopt a PR system, but each point either makes no material difference or exacerbates the flaws she identifies.

First, she argues that FPTP is unfair for voters of small parties, as their votes don’t translate into seats. Small parties are small because they typically don’t co-operate or compromise. Consequently, proportional systems have more parties and less co-operation in terms of platforms and campaigning.

Second, she claims that the current system harms national unity, pointing to when the separatist Bloc Quebecois formed the official opposition. The Bloc’s success was not due to FPTP; it was because Quebec has 78 seats. Changing to a PR system wouldn’t alter Quebec’s seat allocation. While it may be unsettling to have the Bloc as official opposition, the issue lies with the Conservatives’ failure to run a winning campaign in 1993, not the electoral system.

A separatist party would still be competitive regardless of the electoral system. Comparing the Greens and Bloc nationally is disingenuous; the comparison should be to the provincial level. In 2021’s federal election, the Greens garnered only 1.5 per cent of the Quebec vote; the Bloc got 32.1 per cent. This explains why the Greens failed to get a seat in Quebec.

Third, she suggests that FPTP exacerbates regional tensions, implying that minority views in provinces dominated by one party aren’t represented. She cites elections where the Liberals had no seats in Alberta and the Conservatives had none in Toronto. This isn’t necessarily due to the voting system but to specific party platforms and leaders. The lopsided results can’t be placed solely at the doorstep of FPTP. Campaigns matter, and party competitiveness influences outcomes. For example, in the 2021 election Albertans elected two NDP and two Liberal MPs. In that election, nearly two-thirds (65 per cent) of Alberta’s 34 ridings had winning candidates with over 50 per cent of the popular vote. Liberal victories were narrow, with George Chahal winning by 6.3 percentage points and Randy Boissonnault by 1.3 points. Blake Desjarlais (NDP) won by a 3.5 per cent margin. Yet even in Alberta, Heather McPherson (NDP) won with a majority (60.7 per cent).

Majoritarian systems like first-past-the-post punish extreme views on both the left and the right.

Fourth, Nickerson claims that PR systems reduce political polarization and the chances of extremist politics. But evidence suggests otherwise. Academic analysis of electoral systems suggests radical right-wing parties are more than twice as successful at gaining seats under PR than under majoritarian systems. Majoritarian systems punish extreme views on both the left and right, explaining why the People’s Party (PPC), led by Maxime Bernier, has been unsuccessful, but equally why Canada’s Communist Party is also ineffective. A PR system would pave the way for the PPC and other extreme parties, as their chances improve with proportionality.

Proponents of electoral reform argue that PR systems often have higher voter turnout and engagement. This too is based on a false premise. Voter turnout is based on many sociodemographic factors, such as age, education, gender etc. Crucially it also depends on the campaign itself. “Change elections” tend to produce higher turnouts. Ballot box questions can also move the vote. Charisma and policy—such as Justin Trudeau in 2015 promising marijuana legalization—proved compelling for first-time voters. To assert that changing the system would automatically result in better participation is wishful thinking.

A pressing concern with changing the electoral system is that it alters election outcomes. PR systems encourage multi-party campaigns, leading to more coalition governments. While proponents argue this leads to more co-operation, it also means less accountability and more government spending. PR systems often don’t result in majority governments, leading to post-election negotiations to form coalitions. These often involve more than two partners, each seeking additional programs and spending for their constituents. This often results in higher debt and deficits. As no single party is held accountable, similar outcomes occur in future elections.

It’s notable that the minority governments formed in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 federal elections increased spending significantly, with the NDP demanding social programs such as national pharmacare and dental care.

Let’s not kid ourselves: proponents of electoral reform don’t want to change the rules just to be fair to voters. They want to change the rules to favour their preferred parties. Electoral reform provides more incentives for single-issue parties and those that are currently unable to compromise to attain seats and influence.

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I wrote about the amygdala in 2014 because it was coming up on election time in Canada, and a study had emerged suggesting that people with larger amygdalas tended to vote conservative whereas those with smaller amygdalas tended to vote Liberal or NDP.  Before conservatives shout out: “More proof that we’re smarter!” that wasn’t quite what the study found. Amygdala size isn’t about IQ. The evidence suggested that big-amygdala people tend toward black-and-white decision-making. Politicians, parties and plat-forms are either obviously good or obviously bad. If big-amygdala people don’t like something about a candidate, his hair for example, that’s it for him. Small-amygdala people are more inclined to admit that moral and legal issues usually involve gray areas that require navigation.

During 2024, particularly during the US presidential election, I found out more about the amygdala that seemed to describe what was going on.

The amygdala, to put it simply, is the part of the brain that attaches emotion to event. A dangerous looking individual comes running at you out of the darkness. You freak out. You run away or destroy him with judo chops. Either way, it was the amygdala that punched the fight-or-flight button. Given less extreme stimuli, the amygdala is still responding emotionally all the time. Many parts of the brain may be determining how we feel about something later, but in the moment, how and how much we feel is up to our two tiny cerebral peanuts.

Then I read something new. I discovered that the wee amygdala plays a role in human lying.

If you’ve been raised to believe that lying is bad and wrong—and most of us have—then lying makes you feel bad. In brain terms, lying causes an emotional upheaval in the amygdala. Anxiety is unleashed, and perhaps fear, since people don’t like liars much and let you know.

But a strange thing happens in the brain if you keep on lying. The more you lie, the less commotion in the amygdala. The more you lie without public humiliation or other negative consequences, the more your amygdala calms down about it. Here’s the kicker. If you actually benefit by lying, your amygdala relaxes completely.

You can see what direction this is going. The liar who gains from lying tends to become a compulsive liar. Here, in my opinion, is the answer to why there are so many compulsive liars in politics, not just in Canada and the United States but globally. Lying politicians are present, and probably growing in number, because we have created them! We heard their lies, recognized them as liars, and voted for them anyway.

The question “why are so many liars attracted to politics?” has, therefore, two good answers.

Number one: we elect people despite their lying.

Number two: by accepting lies, we caused their amygdalas to become increasingly quiet: “Oh look, he or she, my human host the politician, lied again. Meh.”

He lied at every rally, in every city, and, because his amygdalas kept hearing cheers, they got more and more sedated.

Though I could be talking about a great many countries, including Canada, I am brought to this subject by the recent US presidential election. The world champion of political lying, hands down, is Donald Trump. During his first go as president of the United States, his lies were documented and counted. Here was a politician so worried about lying that he did it tens of thousands of times while in office. In the recent election, Trump kept it up. He lied relentlessly, at every rally, in every city, and because his amygdalas kept hearing cheers, they got more and more sedated.

I titled this column “The Dead Amygdala” because I believe that’s what happened. During the televised political marathon, Trump lied and lied. In response, his Republican audiences laughed and cheered. His amygdalas became so drugged by lack of any negative consequence, they upped and died!

I assume that science will get it right on my Dead Amygdala Theory. Symptoms: compulsive, monotonal lying; making no eye contact; making little sense. Who can forget the 40 minutes of a rally where The Donald didn’t speak at all. We’ll listen to music, he said. For 40 minutes, he stood there and swayed. Someone on-line aptly called it “weaving.” A surefire symptom of the Dead Amygdala: weaving.

When grandpa stops making eye contact, and sense, and starts weaving (and especially if he expresses a desire to run in the next election), it might be time for the home.

Fred Stenson’s many books include the novels Who By Fire, The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

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The Alberta NDP is a political party undergoing a face lift. And the person holding the scalpel is the new leader, Naheed Nenshi.

The transformation began the moment Nenshi entered the race on March 11, 2024, 14 weeks before being declared the winner on June 22.

He flooded the party with tens of thousands of new members and captured more than 62,000 votes, or 86 per cent of the final ballots. Albertans signed up not to support the old New Democratic Party, but to join a “new” New Democratic Party led by a charismatic and nationally known former mayor of Calgary.

Nenshi’s leadership campaign was short on policy specifics but long on energetic promises to defeat Danielle Smith and the UCP in the next provincial election in 2027.

The NDP was becoming the “Nenshi” Democratic Party.

Nenshi doesn’t like that description. In an interview for this column, he said, “the ‘N’ in NDP doesn’t stand for Nenshi any more than it stood for Notley. It’s a party with a huge diversity of views.”

Except that under Notley’s leadership the Alberta NDP was very much the “Notley” Democratic Party, not just because she built the organization from a rump opposition with four seats into government in 2015 and then emerged from the 2023 election loss with the largest official Opposition in Alberta history. Notley was a walking embodiment of traditional NDP values, social and economic.

Nenshi is still finding his sea legs as leader and doesn’t want to trip himself up three years out from an election.

The NDP under Nenshi, however, is a work in progress. That’s because as leader of a political party Nenshi himself is a work in progress. “I’ve never been in opposition,” said Nenshi, who as Calgary mayor from 2010 to 2021 was his own boss. “We’re thinking really hard about how to reach out to Albertans in new ways. You’ll see a lot of that going forward, both for me and for my caucus colleagues.”

He is happy to bash the UCP government as “immoral and dangerous” while offering up the NDP as a “predictable, dependable and rational” government-in-waiting.

It’s all rather vague. But Nenshi insists he has a plan.

He wants to find a balance between attacking the UCP government while also offering up positive alternatives.

He is determined to flesh out a policy on healthcare, for example, by having MLA Luanne Metz, a medical doctor, travel the province speaking with healthcare stakeholders “to develop a really comprehensive blueprint for the future of healthcare in Alberta. So instead of healthcare decisions being made like a pinball machine based on whatever Danielle Smith heard on Tucker Carlson last week, and completely changing things around, we will be going into 2027 with a fully developed, fully costed program for healthcare.”

In other words, wait and see.

That’s pretty much Nenshi’s answer on many fronts.

While taking questions at a Calgary Chamber of Commerce luncheon in September, Nenshi refused to say where he stands on issues like a federal carbon tax, saying he wants to see who wins the next federal election. “My real goal is to hear from all of you about precisely what you mean and what kind of government would make sense for you,” said Nenshi, in the kind of pandering response offered up by politicians trying to avoid the issue.

Nenshi is still finding his sea legs as leader and doesn’t want to trip himself up or box himself into a corner three years out from an election.

For politicians, being something of a mystery has an upside. They are a blank slate on which voters can project their hopes.

Conversely, blank slates are easy to defile. And the UCP has been busy trying to paint the former mayor as a Trudeau ally who botched Calgary’s Green Line LRT project. They want voters to see him as controversial, a risky choice.

But while that will work for the UCP base, it could otherwise be a hard sell. Nenshi is outspoken, skilled and charismatic. He poses a real threat to the UCP. That’s why so many anti-UCP Albertans, particularly those in Calgary, became members. They saw Nenshi as the best bet to take on Smith and defeat her in 2027.

Electing Nenshi as NDP leader was never about maintaining the course set by Rachel Notley. It was never about shoring up the New Democratic Party but about tearing down the UCP.

Nenshi’s followers boarded the NDP ship en masse and made him captain.

He is now promising to lay out a course to take Albertans to a new, better destination.

We have yet to see the map.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

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Some are bound to argue with my choice of year. Computers and cell phones have been around longer than that. So why have I done such a daft thing as pick the present year My excuse is that I believe 2024 will go down in history as the “Year of the Deepfake Elections.”

The term “deepfake” appeared on Reddit in 2017. But a fellow at the University of Montreal had already pioneered the technology in 2014. The idea of the deepfake is to digitally replace one person’s likeness with another. The “digital” here is important, because people started faking non-digital photographs practically the minute they were invented. But doing it on digital video and audio is a relatively new frontier.

And how quickly it has evolved. Right off the bat, deepfakes were used for blackmail and character assassination, starting with putting celebrity heads on other bodies in pornographic videos. This was the adolescent phase. Actually, “phase” is a wrong concept for something that has practically happened all at once. One of the founding fathers of the deepfake was a fellow who mingled digital video of himself with that of Barack Obama and fooled most of the people most of the time in 2017. Another deepfake milestone was when Donald Trump was seen on video encouraging the population of Belgium to exit the Paris climate agreement. In that case there was more reason to be fooled, but for once the stupid thing wasn’t being said by the real Donald.

Under the ubiquitous name AI (artificial intelligence), deepfaking is now so commonplace that your kids might get a deepfake kit this Christmas and give you a video of yourself singing “Yellow Submarine” in a clown costume the same day.

But back to elections and 2024. The reason I’m picking this as the Year of the Deepfake Elections is that, globally, over 50 countries are having elections in 2024. Canada, for the moment, is not one of them. But billions of Earthlings will vote in 2024, so it’s rather important that we know how much of the digital video and audio passing before our eyes and ears is real as opposed to concocted by AI labs on behalf of people who would like to “fix” an election. This would include the dreaded “foreign actors” we are told are tampering with our elections all the time. Never has it been so easy or so likely.

Since this seems rather important, I dug around to see if there are any accessible, reliable tools for knowing when you’re watching a deepfake and not the real article. What I found was a bit sad. Instead of some compact piece of brilliant electronic wizardry that I could point at the suspicious video, and that would then decree it “real” or “fake,” I was told the best way to avoid being fooled by deepfake material is to “watch things live.” If we’re talking elections, I assume this means I should go in person to speeches and debates. Failing that, I should watch live broadcasts. Otherwise, given a delay between a speech or debate and when I watch it, deepfakers could slip in and rejig their candidate’s dumbest statements into something smarter—or meddle with their opponents’ clips and soundbites to make them seem as stupid as possible.

In a nation 7,500 km wide, voters don’t get to live-attend much during a federal election. People with jobs and parenting duties find it hard as well to watch live TV as opposed to repeats and news-hour summaries.

Another piece of advice for avoiding being fooled by the deepfake is to “watch their lips.” If the relationship between the lip action and the verbiage starts to look like Frodo Baggins speaking Mandarin, beware. But, having worked in documentary video for a large chunk of my life, I have to ask: what about audio and video that just happens to be out of sync Is there not a risk of ditching an honest candidate because of a non-insidious technical screw-up?

So there it is, folks. That’s all the advice I could find for protecting us against the deepfake. Watch things live. Watch their lips. For the record, I do totally believe that we will never again experience an election where politicians aren’t made to appear on the internet saying things they never said. There may, however, be another line of defence. Why don’t we go back to noticing if a politician lies or not. If he/she lies, he/she will also cheat—using whatever technology is available. It’s primitive, I suppose, for this world of highly sophisticated technology. But I recommend it nonetheless.

Fred Stenson’s many books include the novels Who By Fire, The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

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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.

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