Pedestrians walk along Stephen Avenue during lunch hour in downtown Calgary on Sept. 1, 2022. The Electoral Boundaries Commission will have to wrestle with Alberta’s unexpected and explosive population growth, particularly in urban centres.Gavin John/The Globe and Mail
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith will soon create a panel with a dull name but consequential assignment: redesigning the province’s electoral map.
To complete the task, the next Electoral Boundaries Commission will have to wrestle with Alberta’s unexpected and explosive population growth, particularly in urban centres. The provincial headcount has increased by 20 per cent since 2017, when the last commission recommended Alberta consolidate a number of rural ridings in order to create three new urban constituencies in time for the 2019 election.
The population burst puts Ms. Smith and the United Conservative Party in a delicate political position. Urban communities have absorbed most of the province’s growth, giving cities – and the New Democratic Party – grounds to argue these areas deserve additional representation in the legislature. But Edmonton is a political wasteland for the UCP and Calgary – once a conservative stronghold – is now a battleground for Ms. Smith.
The UCP will be loath to add ridings to these cities, especially at the expense of rural seats. But if the government leaves the cities underrepresented compared with rural communities, it will give the NDP an opening to argue that Ms. Smith and the UCP do not care about their urban neighbours.
“Boundaries commissions play a vital role in our democracy,” said UCP MLA Nathan Cooper, the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly. “It can be difficult to achieve high levels of engagement around boundary commissions but the commission will make important decisions ensuring all Albertans continue to have equal and effective representation.”
The commission must debate competing democratic principles when redesigning the map.
A man walks near a sign encouraging people to vote on election day in Edmonton on May 29, 2023.AMBER BRACKEN/Reuters
The last commission, formed when the NDP was in power, emphasized equal representation and it narrowed the population gap among ridings by moving electoral boundaries. (Alberta allows for exceptions in remote areas, but a riding’s population generally must be within 25 per cent of the provincial constituency average.)
Roughly 4.07 million people lived in Alberta in 2017, meaning the average population of each provincial riding equalled 46,803 when the electoral map was last edited. By 2021, an average of 48,995 people lived in each constituency. Now, with about 4.9 million people calling Alberta home, the riding average is 56,471 people.
Garett Spelliscy, executive director of the Alberta NDP, said the electoral map should be adjusted based on balancing populations. “The average Alberta voter has the expectation that elections will reflect equal weighting for every vote,” he said.
Mr. Spelliscy also favours clumping together communities with similar characteristics and priorities, a polite way of signalling opposition to an excess of ridings that combine urban and rural areas, for example. His approach would come at the expense of rural Alberta, the UCP’s heartland.
Gwen Day was appointed to the 2016-2017 commission by provincial conservatives and lives on a farm near Carstairs. She disagrees with Mr. Spelliscy’s vision, just as she dissented when the last commission used a calculator to define democracy.
Ms. Day contends that effective representation should trump equal representation, shielding rural ridings from erosion.
“That’s the Canadian standard,” she said.
The Electoral Boundaries Commission, she said, should recognize that by subtracting seats in rural Alberta to create ridings in urban centres, the physical size of remote constituencies expand. This makes it more difficult for a rural MLA to meet people in their home communities, diminishing the politician’s ability to effectively represent residents, Ms. Day said.
Alberta’s primary industries – think agriculture and energy – are largely housed in rural ridings, she added, and must be adequately represented.
The next commission, Ms. Day said, should do what hers did not: redraw the lines in the cities by using the wiggle room afforded by the 25-per-cent population variance, rather than giving urban communities, as a whole, more power at the expense of rural Alberta.
Lisa Young, a political scientist at the University of Calgary, said legal precedent supports this logic.
“The Supreme Court of Canada agrees with the rural folk on this,” she said. “What’s at play here is not so much representation by population, but this idea of effective representation.”
But that decision, related to Saskatchewan, came out in 1991. “We have technology now that was frankly unimaginable then,” Prof. Young said, acknowledging that face-to-face meetings are superior to the online variety.
And this, she said, is why the UCP will have to move cautiously. The commission can legitimately argue against giving Calgary and Edmonton more electoral oomph, but resistance to that position is reasonable – and will be persuasive among urban voters who feel their voices are undervalued and underrepresented.
Given that the commission, from a mathematical perspective, is likely to recommend short-changing cities, Prof. Young said Ms. Smith and the UCP would be wise to appoint panelists that are or appear impartial, so the Premier has more credibility if she has to bat away allegations of gerrymandering.
The governing party and the Official Opposition each get to appoint two people to the commission, and the Premier appoints a fifth person as chair. The public provides input and the chief electoral officer provides advice and information.
The legislature sets parameters, such as the number of ridings it wants on the map. Alberta has had 87 ridings since the 2012 election, up from the 83 constituencies established in time for the 1986 vote.
When Alberta rejigged the borders of its 87 ridings in 2017, the commission proposed creating Calgary-North East, then home to 40,366 people, 14 per cent fewer than the provincial average. In the capital, Edmonton-South emerged as a new riding, with 45,801 inhabitants.
Since then, Alberta’s population has ballooned. The 2021 census counted 65,530 people in Calgary-North East, making it the largest riding in the city and fourth-largest in the province, behind Edmonton-South (68,950), Edmonton-Ellerslie (68,000) and Edmonton-South West (65,790).
Chinenye Anokwuru, a spokeswoman for Alberta’s Justice Minister, said in a statement that the Electoral Boundaries Commission can be appointed any time between this fall and Oct. 31, 2026.
“A fair distribution of electoral divisions is essential to the democratic process. As Alberta’s population continues to grow, it is important to ensure Albertans have effective representation in the legislature,” the statement said.