Three out of the gate: Dale Aalbers, Erin Averbukh, and Ray Donnelly running for UCP nominations
Dale Aalbers, son of Lloydminster Mayor Gerald Aalbers, running for UCP nomination in Vermilion-Lloydminster-Wainwright
The Alberta NDP were the first out of the gate preparing their slate for the next election when five candidates were nominated last week, and it looks like the United Conservative Party is not far behind.
At least three prospective candidates have announced their plans to seek UCP nominations to run in the next provincial election.
Dale Aalbers is running for the UCP nomination in Vermilion-Lloydminster-Wainwright. Aalbers is a former UCP caucus and ministerial staffer. He previously worked for northern Alberta Conservative MP Arnold Viersen and now works as a constituency assistant for Battlefords–Lloydminster–Meadow Lake Conservative MP Rosemarie Falk.
Aalbers is the son of City of Lloydminster Mayor Gerald Aalbers, who was first elected in 2016 (the city straddles the boundary of Alberta and Saskatchewan and holds its municipal elections on Saskatchewan’s electoral calendar).
The riding is currently represented by UCP MLA Garth Rowswell, who was first elected in 2019. Rowswell was re-elected with 74.4 per cent of the vote in 2023.
Erin Averbukh is running for the UCP nomination in Calgary-Acadia.
Averbukh placed third in Calgary City Council’s Ward 14 in the 2025 municipal elections behind winner Landon Johnston and runner-up Devin Elkin.
The riding is currently represented by NDP MLA Diana Batten, who defeated UCP MLA Tyler Shandro by 25 votes in 2023.
Former UCP political staffer Ray Donnelly is running for the UCP nomination in the Lac Ste. Anne-Parkland riding. Donnelly is listed as a registered energy advisor on the EnergyWerx Alberta company website and previously worked as a Legislative and Policy Advisor for Lakeland Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs.
“During COVID, I refused to comply with lockdown policies that violated basic freedoms. That stand nearly cost me my job and my church building. I would make the same choice again,” Donnelly wrote on his campaign website.
While he has not publicly announced his intentions, talk in political circles is that incumbent UCP MLA Shane Getson will not seek re-election. Getson has represented the riding since 2019 and was re-elected in 2023 with 68.9 per cent of the vote.
The UCP has not publicly announced dates for nomination meetings in these ridings. The next provincial election is scheduled to happen in October 2027 and new electoral boundaries are expected to be adopted this year.
The Alberta NDP nominated MLA Lizette Tejada in Calgary-Klein on March 6, and MLA Julia Hayter in Calgary-Edgemont on March 7, and the party has scheduled more nomination meetings in the weeks and months ahead:
Calgary-Mountain View on March 20
Edmonton-South West on March 21
Calgary-Foothills on March 29
Edmonton-South on March 29
Edmonton-Mill Woods on April 8
Banff-Kananaskis on April 25
Edmonton-Highlands-Norwood on May 3
More Alberta politics
More than a dozen First Nations chiefs, band councillors and elders were at the Legislature this week to call on Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP government to put an end to the push for separation from Canada.
“Our rights are being minimized,” Confederacy of Treaty 8 First Nations Grand Chief Trevor Mercredi told reporters. “Our people are being minimized at every level.”
Grand Council Chief Joey Pete of the Confederacy of Treaty 6 First Nations was among a delegation of seven Indigenous leaders from Alberta and Saskatchewan who met privately with King Charles III in London this week.
An MLA committee has been formed to review the next steps for the Forever Canadian citizen initiative petition that included the signatures of more than 456,000 Albertans.
The Select Special Citizen Initiative Proposal Review Committee includes UCP MLAs Brandon Lunty, Jason Nixon, Rajan Sawhney, and Tara Sawyer, and NDP MLAs Court Ellingson and Rakhi Pancholi.
Historical Society of Alberta president Lorien Johansen says the 119-year old volunteer group’s annual funding of $76,000 has been cut in this year’s provincial budget.
“We are the ones that preserve your history as an individual, whether that is the stories your grandparents would tell, the artifacts that end up in museums, the documents and the photos that you end up looking back on,” Johansen told CBC. “Without a historical society collecting all of that information, those things get lost to time, to Mother Nature, to people passing away.”
Deirdre Mitchell-MacLean writes about the state of Naheed Nenshi’s NDP and Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.
More unsuccessful MLA recall petitions continue to be submitted to Elections Alberta.
Petitions to recall Premier Smith in Brooks-Medicine Hat and Minister of Primary and Preventative Health Services Adriana LaGrange in Red Deer-North are two of the recent recall petitions that fell short of reaching the high threshold of signatures needed to trigger a recall vote in those ridings.
Two new recall campaigns were launched yesterday against Progressive Tory Party MLA Peter Guthrie in Airdrie-Cochrane and NDP MLA Marie Renaud in St. Albert.
Recommended watching/listening
Alberta Senator Paula Simons spoke passionately about the dangers of two-tier citizenship during a recent debate about Bill C-12 in the Canadian Senate.
Edmonton Strathcona MP and NDP leadership candidate Heather McPherson spoke with Nora Loreto on the Sandy and Nora Podcast. She also interviewed leadership candidates Tanille Johnston and Rob Ashton.
Toronto-based oil market researcher Rory Johnston joined Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast to talk about the impact of the American and Israeli bombing of Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz on the international price of oil. Johnston is the publisher of Commodity Context and a lecturer at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
Thank you for reading and subscribing
Thank you for reading and subscribing to Daveberta. If you like what you read here today, please feel free to share it with a friend.
You might notice that this week’s Daveberta newsletter is a little shorter than usual. I’ve spent the past few days writing a column about misinformation, AI, and Alberta politics, but I’m not quite ready to publish it today — so expect it to land in your inboxes next week.
And thank you to everyone who listened and shared feedback about the first episode of the new In Session series of the Daveberta Podcast. A new episode will be published and available to paid subscribers in a few days.
Thanks again,
Dave
I’ve started writing about candidate nominations ahead of the next Alberta election, and a few readers have asked if I plan to create a tracking list. The answer is yes! I will create a dedicated page with a list of candidates but I am waiting until after the Electoral Boundaries Commission final report is adopted by the Legislature. At that point I’ll have the finalized list of ridings for the next election. The EBC is expected to submit its final report to Speaker Ric McIver on March 28. ✅
Not that it's anything new, nor confined to any one political party, but I find myself coming to the conclusion that a significant contributing factor to the current state of politics is the selection of candidates whose "experience" is entirely gained working as a political staffer for a party. What they have learned is politics, not governance or leadership. They've learned how the world of politics works, but not the world outside of politics.
That leads to the adoption of ideologies instead of pragmatism. Evidence is found in public opinion polls, not in actual research. And of course, in addition to ideological preferences, legislation and policy are constructed based on what lobbyists and donors tell them.