Worried about gerrymandering? Pay attention to the closest races from Alberta's 2023 election
Fifteen of the twenty closest races were in Calgary
The United Conservative Party government has moved to take greater control of how the electoral boundaries for Alberta’s next provincial election will be drawn. Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP government voted to toss out of majority report of the bipartisan Electoral Boundaries Commission this week and create a new process where an advisory panel reporting to an MLA committee will redraw Alberta’s new electoral map.
The Boundaries Commission report was disregarded by the government after the two UCP appointees to the commission released their own minority report that proposed drastically redrawing the proposed 89 ridings. It is difficult to look at the UCP commissioners proposal to slice the cities of Calgary, Lethbridge and Red Deer into huge rural-urban ridings without thinking it was proposed with the goal of cementing UCP majority government’s for the next decade.
Smith’s UCP are now facing allegations that they are trying to gerrymander the province’s ridings and rig the next election. The opposition has been very critical of the UCP’s ad hoc process, calling it illegitimate, but NDP leader Naheed Nenshi issued a statement today naming Calgary-Mountain View MLA Kathleen Ganley and Edmonton-Mill Woods MLA Christina Gray to the Select Special Committee on Electoral Boundaries:
“They have the experience and integrity this new committee will need in order to hold the UCP accountable.”
“But I want to stress; this does not mean we believe the process is legitimate. We will continue to call on Danielle Smith and the UCP to stop cheating and implement the independent commission’s final report.”
Leduc-Beaumont UCP MLA Brandon Lunty is the committee chair and Strathmore-Chestermere MLA Chantelle de Jonge, Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills UCP MLA Tara Sawyer, and Grande Prairie-Wapiti MLA Ron Wiebe make up the UCP majority on the MLA committee. The members of the committee’s advisory panel have not been publicly released.
The MLA committee will be a hot source of political fireworks and theatrics over the next six months — and a lot of people will be watching closely for signs of partisan gerrymandering — so before we get too distracted I thought it would be a good idea to look at the results of the last provincial election in 2023 and where the races that decided the election were located.
The last Alberta election was pretty darn close
Alberta has a well-earned reputation as the land of historically large majority governments because every election since 1905 has resulted in a majority government — some of them huge. But the results of the last provincial election were pretty darn close in comparison.
The province-wide vote put Smith’s UCP ahead of Rachel Notley’s NDP by 8 points, but that margin is deceiving. The UCP’s province-wide lead was largely a result of the party’s huge margins of victory in rural and small city ridings outside of Calgary and Edmonton. The vote results in that election’s twenty closest races — fifteen which were located in Calgary — were much, much closer.
Premier Smith was speaking off the cuff when she admitted to Postmedia columnist Rick Bell in October 2022 that her party didn’t need to hold most of it’s seats in Calgary to win the 2023 provincial election.
“You know the electoral math. You need 44 seats to win government. If we lost our 39-seat base outside Calgary and Edmonton, we couldn’t form government.
“Now we just need to win 10 to 15 seats in Calgary and Edmonton.”
Smith quickly backtracked on her comments after some UCP MLAs realized the Premier was talking about them losing their jobs. But you can’t argue with math. That was the UCP’s play in 2023 and it worked.
The UCP’s near total domination of the ridings outside of Calgary, Edmonton and Lethbridge gave that party a huge structural advantage over the NDP in the last election.
The UCP wasn’t competitive in any Edmonton ridings, and aside from Banff-Kananaskis , the two urban Lethbridge ridings, and a few suburban commuter ridings surrounding Edmonton, Smith’s party was able to focus its resources on holding onto enough ridings in Calgary to complete the plan she told Bell about months earlier.
Seven of the ten closest races won by the UCP in 2023 were in Calgary and those wins secured the party’s 49 seats in the Legislature. With only 11 seats separating the UCP and NDP in the Legislature, it was the smallest majority of any government in Alberta’s history (the UCP currently has 47 MLAs in the Legislature and the NDP has 38 MLAs).
Top 10 closest UCP wins in 2023
Calgary-North West: UCP candidate Rajan Sawhney won by 143 votes (0.6%)
Calgary-North: UCP candidate Muhammad Yaseen won by 129 votes (0.8%)
Calgary-Bow: UCP candidate Demetrios Nicolaides won by 623 votes (2.4%)
Lethbridge-East: UCP candidate Nathan Neudorf won by 636 votes (2.9%)
Calgary-Cross: UCP candidate Mickey Amery won by 514 votes (3.4%)
Calgary-East: UCP candidate Peter Singh won by 698 votes (4.9%)
Morinville-St. Albert: UCP candidate Dale Nally won by 1,744 votes (6.7%)
Strathcona-Sherwood Park: UCP candidate Nate Glubish won by 2,219 votes (8.5%)
Calgary-Fish Creek: UCP candidate Myles McDougall won by 2,489 votes (9.7%)
Calgary-Peigan: UCP candidate Tanya Fir won by 2,797 votes (12.9%)
NDP’s path to victory still goes through Calgary
Alberta NDP supporters are fond of saying their party would have won enough seats to form government if a few thousand votes had shifted their way in Calgary on May 29, 2023.
Putting aside that’s basically the same as saying “we would have won if more people voted for us,” it does reinforce just how big of a role that city’s voters played in the last provincial election — and how much they will matter again when Albertans go to the polls in 2027.
The NDP made big gains in Calgary in the last election, winning 14 of the city’s 26 ridings and finishing ahead of the UCP in the city-wide popular vote. Eight of the NDP’s closest wins in the last election were in Calgary, and that city’s ridings remain the opposition party’s most likely path to victory in 2027.
The NDP dominated every race in Edmonton and had high hopes for big gains in the suburban commuter ridings surrounding that city. Their only gain among those seats was by Kyle Kasawski in Sherwood Park, but NDP candidates had strong showing in Mornville-St. Albert and Strathcona-Sherwood Park.
The NDP’s only gain outside the urban centres was in the Rocky Mountain and Bow Valley riding of Banff-Kananaskis where Sarah Elmeligi narrowly defeated UCP MLA Miranda Rosin. Not being competitive in any other rural ridings made the NDP’s path to victory much narrower and steeper — something that continues to be a big problem for the NDP today.
Top 10 closest NDP wins in 2023
Calgary-Acadia: NDP candidate Diana Batten won by 22 votes (0.1%)
Calgary-Glenmore: NDP candidate Nagwan Al-Guneid won by 48 votes (0.2%)
Calgary-Edgemont: NDP candidate Julia Hayter won by 284 votes (1.2%)
Calgary-Foothills: NDP candidate Court Ellingson won by 261 votes (1.2%)
Banff-Kananaskis: NDP candidate Sarah Elmeligi won by 303 votes (1.3%)
Calgary-Beddington: NDP candidate Amanda Chapman won by 543 votes (2.6%)
Calgary-Elbow: NDP candidate Samir Kayande won by 743 votes (3.0%)
Calgary-Klein: NDP candidate Lizette Tejada won by 867 votes (4.2%)
Sherwood Park: NDP candidate Kyle Kasawski win by 1,661 votes (6.4%)
Calgary-North East: NDP candidate Gurinder Brar won by 2,039 votes (10.1%)
Alberta is on a collision course with a dangerous political storm
We are now 18 months away from the next scheduled provincial election in October 2027 and we don’t know what the electoral map is going to look like (we’ll find out by November 2026). We don’t even know what our political environment might resemble by that time.
Albertans are being forced on a collision course with a political storm unlike anything anyone who’s involved in provincial politics has seen in their lifetimes.
A referendum on Alberta’s separation from Canada is expected to happen in October 2026 along with at least 9 questions proposed by Premier Smith ranging from abolishing the Senate to limiting access immigrants have to health care and education (Smith is expected to make an announcement about these on April 23). And there might even be a question about banning coal mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains.
Some of these incredibly divisive referendum questions have the potential to dramatically reshape and divide communities and politics in Alberta in ways we haven’t seen in generations — especially with the threat of foreign interference and misinformation promoting Alberta becoming the 51st State.
The UCP has led almost all public voting intention polls released since the 2023 election, some polls by large margins, which has been a five alarm fire for some NDP supporters. But I’m told the NDP have taken some solace in other polls showing a majority of Albertans are unhappy with the direction of the government. There’s a definite unease out there, but it’s unclear who that frustration will be directed toward at in the ballot booth.
Smith was successful at directing much of Albertans anger towards Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government in Ottawa, but the Premier has been more collegial with Prime Minister Mark Carney.
UCP support in rural ridings appears to remain solid, and the 1,000-strong crowd at Smith’s recent fundraising banquet in Red Deer is a pretty good indication that the conservative heartland remains enthusiastically behind her for now. How strong and united the United Conservative Party remains after the province is forced into a separation referendum in October is yet to be seen — especially because the key players in the separation campaigns are prominent UCP activists and constituency-level officials.
The UCP would love to make gains in Edmonton, even winning just one seat, in order to crack the NDP’s urban fortress. Choosing Nenshi, the former Mayor of Calgary, might deflate some NDP vote in the city but the 2025 by-elections in Edmonton-Ellerslie and Edmonton-Strathcona showed the opposition party’s support in the city remained strong despite UCP efforts to make gains in Ellerslie.
Most polls have also shown the UCP pulling ahead of Nenshi’s party in Calgary, but the NDP have been eagerly shopping around a poll from Pollara Strategic Insights that shows the party ahead of the UCP in Calgary.
If Nenshi’s NDP are indeed leading in Calgary and Edmonton, that could put the party in a position to win enough seats to form government if an election were held today under the current electoral map — but maybe not 18-months from now under the new maps that will be drawn by the new MLA committee and its advisory panel.
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Dave
Their participation legitimizes this sham committee. I wish they'd boycotted it.
So can the Tories create "wedges" by providing spaces where tried and true Progressive Conservatives can find a political home?
Right now, being allergic to the NDP, this group "supports" the pro-separatist UCP Zombie caucus and they therefore show up in polling as UCP supporters (not enthusiastic but can't yet see another option?).
It's gonna be a messy 18 months!