The give and take (and partisan wrangling) in Alberta's urban-rural hybrid riding maps

When the judge who led Alberta’s boundaries commission gave politicians a narrow path to revise his panel’s work and rescue two rural ridings from the chopping block, Justice Dallas Miller added a few provisos to protect his electoral map work.

The first condition, which the Smith government adopted, stated that “restoration of the two electoral divisions should: have no impact on any electoral division in Airdrie or containing territory south of Airdrie’s southernmost border…”

And lo and behold, where has the new boundary panel done its most controversial redrawing?

In Lethbridge, Calgary and Canmore. All south of Airdrie.

NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi has called it a “Trump-style, MAGA gerrymandered map” that safeguards UCP-held territory in southern Alberta. Adopt it, Nenshi has warned, and “we’ll see them in court.”

Premier Danielle Smith has expressed early favour for the new plan, regardless of its apparent overstepping of the conditions her side set on her new boundary advisory group.

Back in April, when United Conservatives shelved the official commission’s work, she had insisted she was accepting that majority report, just with Justice Dallas Miller’s extra recommendations which proposed modest tweaks. 

"You'll see that in his Recommendation Five, he is quite prescriptive about the areas that he thinks are problematic," she told reporters.

The new panel chaired by retired judge Brian O’Ferrall, however, did not feel so fettered about sticking to the confines of what Miller and Alberta’s legislature had set out, stating in its “majority” report that the words in Miller’s fifth recommendation don’t warrant “deification.”

“It was not the ‘Fifth Commandment,’” the report states. “It was simply a bit of political ‘give and take.’”

So what did O’Ferrall’s panel give and take?

It took Lethbridge’s two urban seats and split one of them across three rural ridings that variously stretch up to 150 kilometres in each direction to the U.S. border, the TransCanada Highway, Waterton Lakes National Park and the hamlet of Manyberries, due south of Medicine Hat.

A map showing a sole Lethbridge urban seat, as well as three hybrid electoral divisions combining parts of the city with vast surrounding rural regions. (Advisory panel on electoral boundaries)

It took rural acreage communities from the formerly proposed Cochrane-Springbank riding and dispersed them among three west Calgary districts — which, Nenshi argued, gives thousands of Conservative voters to seats currently held by a trio of UCP cabinet ministers.

It took the Diamond Valley and Longview areas away from adjoining rural ridings south of Calgary and gave them to the Canmore-Banff riding on the other side of Kananaskis Country and a highway partially closed for six months every year.

Not only had Miller, the original commission’s chair, recommended against such tinkering in service of restoring a pair of rural ridings in northern and central Alberta; it’s also not clear that these southern Alberta modifications were even necessary to accommodate the un-eliminating of those two districts.

They weren’t knock-on effects caused by bringing back the riding in Rocky Mountain House and Sundre.

In the case of Springbank and Bearspaw, it was a straightforward bit of subtraction, division and addition, separate from any map work to the north.

According to population figures in the new report, Cochrane’s riding shed 9,703 people, and that same amount was split among the three Calgary ridings, without any corresponding adjustments to any other Calgary constituencies.

It leaves the redesigned Cochrane with 46,785 residents, and 13 per cent below the provincial average riding population. The redrawn Calgary-West-Springbank and Calgary-Bow-Springbank each have more than 58,000 people, nine per cent higher than average.

“Adding Springbank to Calgary Bow is said to potentially favour the party in power,” O’Ferrall’s report acknowledged. “But whether that potential will manifest itself in the next election, not even the pollsters with their voter transpositioning software know for sure.”

Springbank was moved because O’Ferrall and the panel’s UCP appointees felt that rural area had more connection to Calgary than to the small town of Cochrane to its north.

Similarly, it felt that “Lethbridge is not an isolated urban municipality,” but is the hub of southern Alberta’s agri-business, health and service district. Therefore, it partially becomes three hub-and-spoke ridings that nearly stretch from Saskatchewan to British Columbia — and, the NDP argues, erases one of Lethbridge’s politically competitive ridings and dilutes those votes in UCP-friendly zones.

LISTEN | Alberta @ Noon on the boundary revisions:

Alberta at Noon52:39Redrawing Alberta's electoral boundaries

O’Farrell and his UCP-appointed majority dismiss complaints their work is unconstitutional as “polarizing nonsense.”

They take similar umbrage in their report with the NDP-appointed minority’s protests about the new map work in southern Alberta, saying “it can be summarized quite simply. Our proposals are constitutional; yours are not. Our proposals are non-partisan; yours are not.”

For the record, Smith’s cabinet chose O’Ferrall, a former Court of Appeal judge who has donated thousands of dollars to the UCP and federal conservatives since he retired in 2022, and served in court as lawyer for an Alberta Progressive Conservative riding association two decades ago before he was a judge.

The United Conservatives’ two appointees to the panel are Monte Solberg, a former Conservative MP and head of a Calgary-based lobby firm who has donated $2,883 to Smith’s party this year, including some while serving on the panel; and Darwin Durnie, a longtime conservative political donor and municipal public works official who has a lengthy history as a boundary-making hobbyist of sorts, having submitted maps to Alberta’s boundary commissions that propose several rural-urban hybrid ridings.

The NDP’s appointees, constitutional law professor Gerard Kennedy and former Okotoks councillor Brent Robinson, have no record of provincial donations in Elections Alberta’s database. Kennedy has donated federally, predominantly to Conservatives and some to Liberals.

Regardless of how partisan the boundary panelists are or aren’t, the partisan MLAs are set to debate the contentious report in coming days. 

Smith likes the idea of Lethbridge’s hybrid ridings, similar to how Medicine Hat is divided between her Brooks-Medicine Hat seat and a UCP colleague’s Cypress-Medicine Hat.

“I represent a hybrid riding, and I think Medicine Hat is well-served by having two representatives. I think Lethbridge will be very well-served by having four representatives,” she told reporters Tuesday.

Premier Danielle Smith, who represents a rural-urban hybrid riding in Medicine Hat, said Lethbridge would be well-served by having several rural-urban hybrid MLAs instead of two city-only MLAs. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press)

The NDP cannot launch a lawsuit against this new riding map until the legislature approves it and puts it into effect. A successful challenge would have to argue that the ridings violate the “effective representation” guarantees in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms — such a claim could theoretically come from a political party, or the affected residents in Lethbridge or elsewhere, including the few thousand people in Springbank and Bearspaw who find themselves mixed into 50,000-person-plus seats in Alberta’s biggest city.

Original commission chair Miller, for his part, wrote in his report that he didn’t find Lethbridge or Springbank hybrids “necessarily unreasonable or procedurally unfair,” noting that some public members proposed them to the commission. But that report blurb wasn’t part of the government motion that created the do-over boundary review, unlike the one urging against any redrawing work south of Airdrie.

Smith discussed on Tuesday being ready to “assemble a legal team” ahead of a potential court challenge. When asked about Miller’s warning on southern ridings she said: “I'll take a closer look at it and talk to the lawyers about that.”