Danielle Smith is getting rid of fair elections in Alberta
Partisan gerrymandering returns to Canada, courtesy of Alberta's UCP.
Gerrymandering, the practice by which a political leader manipulates district or riding boundaries to create an advantage for their in-group in winning elections, is a scourge upon democracy. It is in fact the quiet death of a democracy, the degeneration into competitive authoritarianism, where elections exist but are neither free nor fair.
The name itself stems from a centuries-old meme, dating to the early history of the United States post-revolution. In 1812, then-Governor of Massachusetts Elbridge Gerry performed this corrupt practice, and the term “gerry-mander” was originated by political cartoonist Elkanah Tisdale as a portmanteau of Governor Gerry’s last name and “salamander”, since one of the manipulated districts visibly resembled the shape of this amphibian.
And for the Yankee Empire, gerrymandering is indeed as integral to their cultural identity as baseball and apple pie. Frequently, politicians have utilized this tool to rig elections in their favour, packing voters in such a way as to maximize the number of seats they win, while reducing the number of seats their opponents win. Rather than voters choosing their leaders in the United States, it is the leaders who choose their voters.
And since the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in 2019 that gerrymandering was not a question that federal courts could adjudicate, there is essentially no legal remedy for voters against gerrymandering. Fast-forward to 2026, and the Yankees have slipped even further into competitive authoritarianism, with Republicans explicitly gerrymandering seats in their states to ice Democrats out, and Democrats now returning the favour in blue states.
Canada, in contrast, has built a consensus at both the federal and subnational levels that riding boundaries should be drawn by an independent body, not merely a multipartisan group but rather a non-partisan group. In the 1950s, Manitoba was the first to delegate the power of drawing boundaries away to such an independent group, and nationally the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act would do the same before the 1968 Canadian Federal Election. This distinction shows the strength of our democracy in comparison to the Yankee Empire’s competitive authoritarian regime.
The only exception to this status quo was a feeble attempt at gerrymandering Prince Edward Island in 2006, where then-Premier Pat Binns’ Conservative government threw out the independently-drawn riding boundaries after they would have caused incumbents to be redistricted. This backfired, however, as PEI would throw out the Binns Conservatives en masse in 2007, flipping the island to a Liberal majority under Robert Ghiz.
Binns’ attempt at gerrymandering failed primarily because it did not actually create much strategic advantage, and voters found it distasteful. But twenty years later, Premier Danielle Smith of Alberta’s United Conservative Party is carrying out a much more advanced gerrymandering strategy, one that is unfortunately very likely to succeed.
Two days ago, Alberta’s Conservative majority passed a motion in the provincial legislature against a helpless NDP opposition, throwing out the boundaries drawn by the independent commission and creating a new partisan group that will draw alternative ridings. The Smith Conservatives plan to break apart NDP ridings in the urban centres of Edmonton and Calgary, splitting the NDP voters up into new rural-urban hybrid ridings where they’ll be outnumbered by rural voters whom are firmly right-wing.
This rural-urban voter dynamic will increase the effectiveness of the gerrymandering strategy. These new boundaries will not follow any organic divisions of communities or neighbourhoods, but will rather be designed to neutralize voters by pairing them with opposite-minded ones. Furthermore, while right-leaning PEI voters took offence to the gerrymandering twenty years ago and may have broken for the Liberals, Albertan Conservatives today have quite literally zero moral standards, and will vote blue no matter who.
Indeed, while Naheed Nenshi’s Alberta NDP can make their complaints, they have effectively no recourse. The ANDP has already hit a ceiling for seat count due to their limited popularity outside Alberta’s urban centres, and their only victory in modern history involved two right-wing parties splitting the vote, a scenario which no longer exists. If they lose their foothold in Edmonton and Calgary to gerrymandering, Alberta will fully collapse into one-party Conservative rule, with not even the pretense of an opposition remaining.
Premier Smith’s plan to enshrine decades of Conservative hegemony will ruin any notion that Alberta is a democratic society. It will degrade into competitive authoritarianism, where the Notwithstanding Clause is used regularly to violate civil rights, and the only shifts in power will come when one Conservative replaces another. There will be no place for ideological debate outside the confines set by the Party.
This is no way for a society to live…yet it is exactly what Alberta is about to become. And I have no faith that Albertan voters will turn away before it’s too late.