Alberta’s governing UCP to revisit proposed riding changes before next election

EDMONTON – Alberta’s governing United Conservatives are looking to take another run at redrawing provincial riding boundaries – a move the Opposition NDP calls a cynical backdoor scheme to rig the October 2027 general election.

“Why is the premier doing this? Why is she so afraid?” Opposition NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi said to Premier Danielle Smith in chamber debate Thursday.

Nenshi accused Smith of being so desperate to cling to power that she’d stoop to gerrymandering – a process of designing boundaries around voting patterns to benefit one party over another.

“This government has been clear from the start that they only care about power. They don’t care about ethical government,” Nenshi said.

Those accusations were brushed aside by Smith, who compared claims of vote rigging to those made by U.S. President Donald Trump and accused Nenshi of hating rural Albertans.

Smith’s caucus has signalled in legislature documents it will soon introduce a motion in the house to revisit a recent bipartisan panel recommendation on the new boundaries. The motion, if passed, would see a new panel of legislature members — a majority from Smith’s caucus — oversee revisions crafted by a second bipartisan panel.

The first panel report was delivered to the legislature last month, but it was a document riven with internal conflict.

In it, the UCP-appointed members on the panel disagreed with the recommendations of the majority. The UCP members urged the legislature accept what panel chair Dallas Miller labeled a dangerous and radical redrawing of boundary lines.

The UCP members on the panel recommended creating more than a dozen merged urban and rural ridings, which the majority said was an indefensible suggestion that favoured the rural-dominant UCP at the ballot box.

As a compromise, Miller, a judge, has suggested the legislature could revisit the process with an eye to boosting the number of ridings to 91 from the current 87. The panel had originally been told it could only add two more seats, bringing the total 89, but Miller said going to 91 would allow for rural ridings to be maintained.

He also said a further increase would be beneficial overall since Alberta’s population expanded by 20 per cent since 2017 when the maps were last adjusted.

Miller and the NDP-appointees who formed the majority had presented new boundaries that added seats in Edmonton and Calgary while also condensing rural seats by two. It also recommended some rural and urban hybrid ridings, though far fewer than what the minority UCPers had suggested.

The minority, in their report, said more hybrid ridings are “necessary to respond to demographic change, reduce polarization, and reflect Alberta’s increasingly interconnected urban-rural landscape.”

But the majority wrote that the hybrid ridings being put forward, especially in Calgary, paid little attention to population figures and questioned why non-hybrid ridings in the city’s north would be near the maximum population allowed while hybrid ridings in south Calgary would be below or at the provincial average.

“It is difficult to see how creating electoral divisions with highly unevenly distributed populations within the same city creates more effective representation,” the majority wrote.

Nenshi’s NDP have been calling for the assembly to adopt the majority recommended maps, saying it’s the democratic thing to do considering the panel spent months hearing from Albertans in public hearings.

But Smith told the house Thursday that going to 91 as Miller suggested is what they plan to do, and that is why they are revisiting the entire process.

She said during question period it’s a way to make sure rural voters have an equal voice in the democratic process. Smith said she was surprised the NDP would turn their backs on those outside the cities “when they know that this (new) report would make it better for rural Alberta.”

If the motion passes, the new committee of MLAs and the second bipartisan panel would have until the fall to report back.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 16, 2026.