What exactly is gerrymandering? It’s the government redrawing electoral boundaries to improve their chances of winning. Also, as I said last week, to reduce the risk of being held accountable by voters. As Dr. Jared Wesley added, there’s another word for it: “cheating.”
Last week on West of Centre, Kathleen Petty asked the Premier why she thought that Conservative support was dissipating in urban centres. Her response was nonsensical but the point is that she understands it is happening and has no interest in meeting urban voters where they are.
On September 22, I attended an event where she was asked what her plan was to win against the NDP in 2027. She said it was just a fact that people living in urban centres will “eventually vote Liberal and NDP.” That’s it. Nothing a political party can do about it; just poor Danielle swimming against the overwhelming tide of orange and red waves.
It’s not an argument I would make, especially when there’s far more evidence to support a more sensible alternative: Canadian Conservatives are even managing to alienate Conservative commentators with their maga-style constant division and weird culture war garbage. I cannot imagine a scenario in which regular voters aren’t tired of it, too.
Even Lorne Gunter found it necessary to bring up the Premier’s constant admiration for the worst of the U.S. administration. This weekend, at the Rebel Live event (which I discovered I could have watched online for free instead of attending in person for $99), the Premier brought up a new Government of Alberta program called TRACE. She then likened it to the great work of Elon Musk's DOGE.
Yes, the incredibly destructive deletion of programs and spending they knew nothing about, which barely hit the country’s expense lines but has managed to make life more difficult for people living and working there… has Danielle Smith all googly-eyed at the possibility of emulating it here.
Of course, if Danielle Smith is right, we have to account for the fact that Mr. Gunter lives in an urban centre and perhaps the surrounding progressivism has just finally overtaken him.
Obviously, I kid. Probably.
What’s really going on in the UCP influencer circles is different. They're shifting responsibility away from themselves—as a political party, elected officials, and supporters—and onto a political environment they can change without having to earn more votes.
They won in 2019 with the most votes ever cast for a single party. Four years later, they barely secured a majority under the same electoral boundaries.
The boundaries haven’t changed since 2019.
But UCP leadership did.
The “popular vote” argument
Electoral Boundary Commissions are particularly concerned with two things: population and ensuring “communities of interest” stay together. If you’re a UCP-appointed commission, apparently you’re more concerned with preserving seats in rural because it doesn’t matter if the population is dwindling; it’s a seat that matters to your electoral success.
The real lack in his argument comes from the omission of the fact that the narrow majority the UCP did get was intentional; Danielle Smith openly said she only needed a few seats in Calgary to win and she wasn’t worried about trying to get more voters into her camp.
She’s also reiterated that during the event on the 22nd; she doesn’t know what priorities exist for voters in Calgary-Buffalo and doesn’t, apparently, care to find out.
While the New Democrats might have access to a few more seats, it would be especially folly to ignore the “Cabinet Member Protection Plan” that has been put in place to secure that bare minimum requirement.
Distractions, distractions.
In 2019, Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party of Canada won “the popular vote” but lost the election. It didn’t take a tonne of work to find out that Mr. Scheer had managed to increase support primarily in areas where the CPC was already popular. Voter turnout increased in places like Alberta and Saskatchewan—where those additional votes couldn't deliver additional seats in ridings the Conservatives already held—but either remained unchanged or decreased in seat-rich urban areas.
This is what Danielle Smith alluded to but, like, totally doesn’t get why.
I don’t like the “losing the popular vote” argument because earning a large number of additional votes in ridings you’ve already secured doesn’t entitle you to seats elsewhere.
Making it seem as though there are “losers” in this process we call democracy is missing the point, and privilege, of serving entirely.
A “level the playing field” argument
I’m old enough to remember when Conservatives were able to win any riding in this province and certainly didn’t need to come up with excuses for why they were at risk of losing.
To the New Democrats.
When the premier’s chief of staff jumps into the fray to defend Dear Leader, the scent of fresh popcorn seems to magically follow. Rob Anderson, who also authored the Free Alberta Strategy, threw many words into the void that is X in response to a column from Postmedia’s Don Braid on the UCP’s gerrymandering. The most interesting part was this:
Further, last election the NDP lost the popular vote by almost 10 percent and still almost ended up winning the most seats. So obviously they don’t want any change whatsoever that could level the playing field.
Rob Anderson, Chief of Staff to Danielle Smith, on X, October 28, 2026
It’s an incredible take, from a partisan Conservative staffer in a Conservative Premier’s Office.
In Alberta.
It is basically the same argument that the Premier herself is making: the UCP aren’t going to try and govern in a way that will encourage more people to vote for them, so, they have to engineer a way to make the support they do have more useful.
With that being said, the Premier and her party have a year to distance themselves from their separation question and the more than $100 million they wasted on it.
They have more time to try to make Albertans believe that cutting off one of the separatist hydra’s heads and saying '“okay but this time for realsies— no separatist takeover! Pinky swear!” Will be enough.
It might work, too.
After all, Danielle Smith managed to convince a bare majority of voters that she would lead a completely average right-of-centre party as government in the 2023 election. And she only had six months of denying she’d be a total chaos monkey at the helm that time.
That is, unless voters decide they want a more stable and responsible government.
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While we do need to keep our guard up regardless of how things play out from here I do tend to side with Dave Cournoyer on this particular issue which is that most of this new electoral mapping is likely to get thrown out immediately once it hits a judge’s desk
The one we do need to keep our eye on however is Lethbridge and the surrounding Calgary areas because if any of these boundaries do get a pass that’ll probably be the one