The Final Report of Alberta’s Provincial Electoral Boundaries Commission Contains a Clumsy Conservative Gerrymander

Posted on 2026/03/30 by J.W.J. Bowden

Even this American representation of gerrymandering presumes the equality of population between the various electoral districts.

The Reports in 2025-2026

The Lieutenant Governor-in-Council established the commission for the 2020s on 28 March 2025 and made Justice Dallas K. Miller the chair. Danielle Smith, Premier of Alberta and leader of the United Conservative Party, nominated John Evans and Julian Martin, while Naheed Nenshi, leader of the New Democratic Party and the Opposition, nominated Greg Clark and Susan Samson.[1]

The commission accepted written submissions between 17 April and 23 May 2025, held 28 public hearings across Alberta and virtually from 29 May to 23 June 2025, and sent its interim report to the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly on 23 October 2025.[2] The interim report reviewed the judicial doctrine of effective representation in Canada and warned: “While legislators are free to reject Commissions’ recommendations, they do so at their peril.”[3] Therein the commissioners also decided to use the Government of Alberta’s population estimates for July 2024 instead of any of Statistics Canada’s latest population estimates for Alberta or the decennial census of 2021. This put Alberta’s population at 4,888,723; the average population of Alberta’s 89 ridings therefore comes to 54,929.[4] However, nowhere did the commission list the estimated populations of the 87 ridings created under the previous Electoral Divisions Act in the 2010s, so we cannot see the starting point and the extent to which the 89 electoral districts listed in this interim report improved upon what already existed.

The commission held a second round of 19 public hearings between 12 and 21 January 2026, mainly in Calgary and Edmonton this time but with virtual hearings dedicated to Northern Alberta and South and Central Alberta. The commissioners sent their final report to the Speaker on 23 March 2026; for the first time in the history of readjusting electoral boundaries by independent commission in Alberta, this final report included a dissent. The two Conservative appointees broke with their colleagues and the judge chairing the commission and came up with a crude and obvious gerrymander which cracks New Democratic urban ridings in Edmonton and Calgary and blends them into sprawling monstrosities that reach outward toward the rural environs of these cities. This Minority Report appears as Appendix E in the final report.[5]

The commission’s interim report put forward a good electoral map which came in at only 2.56% on the Loosemore-Hanby Index. After holding the second round of public hearings, the commission took that feedback into account and still ended up with a low disproportinality of only 2.89%. The dissent, in contrast, significantly increased the disproportionality to 4.28% by deliberately cutting into some purely urban ridings in Edmonton and Calgary and extending them into their rural environs.

I have uploaded my spreadsheet here, which contains five tabs. The first compares the disproportionality of all three reports on the Loosemore-Hanby Index side by side. The second provides an alternative method of measuring and visualising disproportionality by tracking the numbers of the 89 ridings the populations of which fall within increments of 5% from the electoral quota from greater than – 25% to greater than +25%. The higher the number of ridings which cluster around – 5% and +5% of the mean (so within 10% overall), the better and the more proportional the electoral map. Under the interim report, 59 out of 89 ridings, or 66.29%, fell within 10% of the electoral quota; under the final report, the number and proportion of ridings with came within 10% of the electoral quota dropped slightly to 55 of 89, or 61.80%. The final report mainly shifted ridings from the –5% to +5%. This method also lays bare the disproportionality of the Conservative gerrymander, because the number and proportion of ridings within 10% of the average drops to only 37 of 89, or 41.57%. Suddenly ridings with populations between 15% and 25% higher than the electoral quota pop up as well.

The separate tabs for the interim report, final report, and dissenting report show the full calculations on the Loosemore-Hanby Index as well as the breakdown in increments of 5% from the electoral quota.

 The Conservative Gerrymander

 Justice Dallas K. Miller denounced this gerrymander in his “Response to the Minority Report” on pages 62 to 65 of the final report. First, he objected that the Conservative placemen used “Commission” as a metonym in their dissent when they expressed only their own views and did not speak for the commission as a whole. Second, he declared that “the minority’s proposed maps violated the principle of procedural fairness, unreasonably apply the statutory considerations, and likely violate section 3 of the Charter” – in other words, that the Conservative gerrymander contradicts the doctrine of effective representation and would therefore be unconstitutional if the legislature enacted it into law.[6]  Miller pointed out that all five commissioners agreed unanimously to the interim report but that the two Conservative placemen suddenly objected at the very end of the process; their “about-face” therefore gave the public no notice, and “the minority’s reasons are substantively unreasonable.”[7] This counts as a strong condemnation from a judge. Miller further lambasted their Conservatives for having proposed maps “anything but clear and understandable,” which therefore breach section 14(e) of the statute.[8] He noted that “Calgary-Foothills-Airdrie West and Calgary-Nolan Hill-Cochrane look strange, with bits and pieces of various municipalities and rural areas patched together without rhyme or reason.”[9]

Miller charged that the Conservatives had also “inflated the population of most electoral divisions in the northeast of Calgary, while decreasing the average population of electoral divisions in the south of the City, without a valid statutory or constitutional reason to do so.” Worse still, they tried to justify this blatant gerrymander on the grounds that the northeastern area contains fewer electors than the southern parts of Calgary – even though the Legislature of Alberta decided under the Electoral Boundaries Commission Act that MLA shall represent approximately the same number of people, not electors. What they did has no legal basis.[10]

Miller, speaking for the two New Democrats on the commission as well, concluded that the Conservatives had crafted a gerrymander and advised the legislature to ignore it:

“the minority report seems to be motivated by other considerations. To put it starkly, 15 electoral divisions mostly in central and northeast Calgary are approximately 11% above the average provincial population. By contrast, 14 electoral divisions mostly in the south and west of Calgary have an average variance of just 2% above the provincial average. What might be the minority’s true motivation for this? Our friends south of the border may have a term for this type of redistricting. […]

No previous Electoral Boundaries Commission has ever had a minority report which provided maps of alternative electoral boundaries or constituency-by-constituency descriptions. […]The majority objects in the strongest terms to this unconstitutional minority report and wishes to warn the Legislature against its adoption.”[11]

Here, however, Miller gives the dissent too much credit, because John Evans and Julian Martin did not have the decency to gerrymander using American methods at all but instead dismembered the electoral map in a much more ham-fisted and transparently unscrupulous way.

Americans Gerrymander Better

Gerrymandering means that the party in power manipulates the boundaries of electoral districts to maximize the votes of its own supporters and dilute those of its opponents in an attempt to stay in office as long as possible. [12] This pattern marked the first few decades after Confederation in Canada and still holds sway in many American states today. This blended word comes from the combination of Governor Eldridge Gerry of Massachusetts and salamander; the original Gerrymander refers to the serpentine shape of one infamous congressional district that the legislature established in the 1810s to preserve a Democratic-Republic voting block and which Gerry signed into law.[13] Ideally, the electoral districts within a province would each contain roughly the same number of people within a narrow variance of the average number of people per MLA, and these districts would also be established without regard to political party and would instead follow the general geographic contours of the province. Since single-member districts cannot by definition overlap with one another, the most mathematically “compact”, or perfect, electoral district has only four sides.[14] In contrast, a gerrymandered district sprawls out into the squiggly lines of a pernicious polygon that cobbles together multiple pockets of support for one political party.[15]

A series of rulings by the US Supreme Court have mandated the equality of population of congressional districts within a state but did not ban gerrymandering. Consequently, even districts gerrymandered to favour one party over another must still contain near-equal populations which deviate by far smaller percentages from the mean than what EBRA and all provincial equivalents allow in Canada.[16] American congressional districts within each state can be both gerrymandered and contain very similar populations within the narrowest possible margins of the average number of people per congressional representative.[17]  This simply does not compute in the Canadian experience, where the Doctrine of Effective Representation coupled within high acceptable deviations from smaller electoral quotas have produced electoral districts at once more compact (closer to having only four sides and therefore not gerrymandered) and also with higher variances from the average population within a province.

For example, the legislature of Texas undertook a highly controversial mid-term redistricting of the state’s 38 congressional districts in August 2025 which relied upon the state’s population under the decennial census of 2020 (29,145,505).[18] Fully 37 of the 38 new congressional districts contain populations of precisely the average number of people per district (what the Lone Star State calls the “ideal constituency population”) of 766,987; the other remaining district contains 766,986, one less than this average out of arithmetic necessity.[19] This electoral map, openly gerrymandered to help the Republicans win five more seats in the US House of Representatives in November 2026, therefore registers at 0.0000033% on the Loosemore-Hanby Index.[20] This pro-Republican mid-term gerrymander in Texas prompted California to amend its state constitution by referendum and replace the electoral map drawn up by an independent electoral boundaries commission with a pro-Democratic gerrymander designed to help the Democrats win five additional seats in the US House of Representatives in 2026.[21] The independent electoral commission would resume its work after the decennial census of 2030. California’s population of 39,523,437 gave its 52 congressional districts an average of 760,066 inhabitants; all its congressional districts contain either 760,065, 760,066, or 760,067 people, and its new gerrymander scores at 0.0000041% on the Loosemore-Hanby Index.[22] Nothing could better illustrate that the disproportionality in the number of people per elected representative and gerrymandering remain distinct concepts in the United States.

The Conservative placemen on Alberta’s Electoral Boundaries Commission lacked this finesse and made the mistake of turning several ridings into sprawling polygons without also keeping their populations equal. Even in the United States, the courts would probably strike down their gerrymander as unconstitutional.

Conclusion

The dissent included within the commission’s final report now gives the United Conservative majority in the legislative assembly the chance to ram through this gerrymander. The problem lies in how the Electoral Boundaries Commission Act of Alberta brings the new electoral boundaries into force. The federal Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act and the equivalent statutes in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, and Manitoba mandate that the Governor-in-Council must proclaim the electoral map contained in the independent commission’s final report into force as secondary legislation within a specified timeframe. However, the statutes for the other provinces – including Alberta’s – do not.

The Electoral Boundaries Commission Act gives politicians a veto over the commission’s report and the authority to modify it. Even Justice Miller himself recognised this possibility. The “Government shall, at the same session, introduce a bill to establish new electoral divisions for Alberta in accordance with the resolution” of the Legislative Assembly but only “if the Assembly, by resolution, approves or approves with alterations the proposals of the Commission.”[23] Here the statute reduces the commission’s final report to a mere series of “proposals.” The Government’s bill would then enter into force only upon the next writs of a general election.[24]

The previous process in the 2010s shows how this process would normally happen in Alberta, where the Legislative Assembly might alter the names of some electoral districts but would not dare change any of the boundaries itself. The Speaker of the Legislative Assembly received the Electoral Boundaries Commission’s final report on 19 October 2017,[25] and he tabled it as soon as the assembly started sitting again on 30 October 2017.[26] Government Motion 34 asked that the Legislative Assembly “concur in the recommendations of the final report of the Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission” on 28 November 2017.[27] The Legislative Assembly proposed six amendments to change only the names of electoral districts and carried three of them.[28] The Government House Leader noted at the end of the debate that “we now have the basis for bringing forward a piece of legislation to implement the changes recommended by the commission,” which shows that MLAs can influence and veto at least some aspects of the commission’s final report – unlike in other provinces which implement their commissions’ reports through secondary legislation.[29] The Government House Leader tabled Bill 33: Electoral Divisions Act at 1st Reading on 4 December 2017.[30] The bill underwent three days of debate at 2nd Reading on 5, 6, and 12 December but passed the Committee of the Whole without amending on 12 December 2017,[31] and subsequently passed 3rd Reading on 13 December.[32] The Lieutenant Governor granted it Royal Assent by written declaration 15 December 2017.

Even if the Smith government attempt to enact the gerrymandered electoral boundaries contained in the dissent instead of the legitimate ones from the final report, the courts would almost certainly strike down such a Representation Act as unconstitutional, as Justice Miller warned. But she could still obtain a snap election on the gerrymander before the courts have time to strike down the impugned legislation and force the legislature to adopt the electoral boundaries contained in the final report as a remedy. The voters would then have to punish the United Conservative Party at the polls and make them think again.

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Notes

[1] Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission, Proposed Electoral Division Areas, Boundaries, and Names for Alberta: Interim Report to the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, 2025-2026 “Introduction to the Commission,” (Edmonton: October 2025), at page 4.

[2] Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission, “Submissions and Transcripts,” accessed 29 March 2026.

<https://abebc.ca/submissions-and-transcripts/&gt;

[3] Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission, Proposed Electoral Division Areas, Boundaries, and Names for Alberta: Interim Report to the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, 2025-2026 “Introduction to the Commission,” (Edmonton: October 2025), at page 9.

[4] Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission, Proposed Electoral Division Areas, Boundaries, and Names for Alberta: Interim Report to the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, 2025-2026 “Introduction to the Commission,” (Edmonton: October 2025), at page 17.

[5] Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission, Final Electoral Boundaries Commission Report, 2025-2026, 23 March 2026, “Appendix E: Minority Report and Maps,” at pages 1-76.

[6] Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission, Final Electoral Boundaries Commission Report, 2025-2026, 23 March 2026, “Response to the Minority Report and Maps,” at page 62.

[7] Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission, Final Electoral Boundaries Commission Report, 2025-2026, 23 March 2026, “Response to the Minority Report and Maps,” at page 62.

[8] Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission, Final Electoral Boundaries Commission Report, 2025-2026, 23 March 2026, “Response to the Minority Report and Maps,” at page 63.

[9] Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission, Final Electoral Boundaries Commission Report, 2025-2026, 23 March 2026, “Response to the Minority Report and Maps,” at page 63.

[10] Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission, Final Electoral Boundaries Commission Report, 2025-2026, 23 March 2026, “Response to the Minority Report and Maps,” at page 63.

[11] Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission, Final Electoral Boundaries Commission Report, 2025-2026, 23 March 2026, “Response to the Minority Report and Maps,” at pages 63-64.

[12] Nick Seabrook, One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2022), 4-5. A gerrymandered electoral map might therefore fixate on the number of electors, rather than the population, per electoral district.

[13] Seabrook, One Person, One Vote, 13-14.

[14] A circle would be the most mathematically “compact” shape.

[15] Zach Taylor, Jack Lucas, J.P. Kirby, and Christopher Macdonald Hewitt, “Canada’s Federal Electoral Districts, 1867-2021,” Canadian Journal of Political Science (2023): 6.

[16] Taylor et al., “Canada’s Federal Electoral Districts, 1867-2021,” 14.

[17] Roach, “Chartering the Electoral Map into the Future,” 206. In the 2020s, the average population of an American congressional district across the 50 states also came to 752,689, compared to an average electoral quota across the 10 provinces of 91,106. United States. Department of Commerce. Census Bureau, “2020 Census Apportionment Results – Table 1: Apportionment Population and Number of Representatives by State: 2020 Census,” 26 April 2021. <https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2020/dec/2020-apportionment-data.html&gt;

[18] United States. Department of Commerce. Census Bureau, “2020 Census Apportionment Results – Table 1 : Apportionment Population and Number of Representatives by State: 2020 Census,” 26 April 2021. <https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/2020/data/apportionment/apportionment-2020-table01.xlsx&gt;

[19] Texas, Texas Legislative Council, Congressional Districts – Plan C 2308, District Population Analysis with County Subtotals, 29 July 2025. <https://data.capitol.texas.gov/dataset/planc2308/resource/7913dc72-1d21-4b71-adfd-e2bea96835c7&gt;

[20] Liz Crampton and Zach Montellaro, “Texas GOP Passes the House Gerrymander Trump Asked For,” Politico, 23 August 2025. <https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/23/texas-passes-congressional-map-gerrymander-00519116&gt;

[21] Melanie Mason and Jeremy B. White, “It Started with a Bad Internal Poll. How Newsome Turned It Around to Beat Trump on Redistricting,” Politico, 5 November 2025.

< https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/05/prop50-newsom-strategy-00630313&gt;

[22] California, California State Assembly, Committee on Elections, Proposed Congressional Map AB 604, AB 604 Redistricting File (ZIP), 18 August 2025. <https://aelc.assembly.ca.gov/media/2618&gt;

[23] Electoral Boundaries Commission Act, RSA 2000, Chapter E-3, at section 11(1).

[24] Electoral Boundaries Commission Act, RSA 2000, Chapter E-3, at section 11(2).

[25] Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission, Final Report to the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta: Proposed Electoral Division Areas, Boundaries, and Names for Alberta, 5 October 2017.

[26]  Robert E. Wanner (Speaker of the Legislative Assembly), “Tabling Returns and Reports”, Alberta Hansard, 29th Legislature, 3rd Session, Day 3, 30 October 2017, at page 1611; Legislative Assembly of Alberta, 29th Legislation, 3rd Session, Sessional Paper 456/2017, 19 October 2017.

[27] Deron Bilous (Minister of Economic Development and Trade), “Government Motions: Electoral Boundaries Commission Final Report,” Alberta Hansard, 29th Legislature, 3rd Session, Day 57, Tuesday evening, 28 November 2017, at page 2069.

[28] Brian Mason (Government House Leader), “Government Motions: Electoral Boundaries Commission Final Report,” Alberta Hansard, 29th Legislature, 3rd Session, Day 57, Tuesday evening, 28 November 2017, at page 2085.

[29] Brian Mason (Government House Leader), “Government Motions: Electoral Boundaries Commission Final Report,” Alberta Hansard, 29th Legislature, 3rd Session, Day 57, Tuesday evening, 28 November 2017, at page 2085.

[30] Marlin Schmidt (Minister of Advanced Education filling in for the Government House Leader), “Introduction of Bills: Bill 33, Electoral Divisions Act,” Alberta Hansard, 29th Legislature, 3rd Session, Day 60, 4 December 2017, at page 2190.

[31] Graham Sucha (Acting Chair), “Bill 33: Electoral Divisions Act,” Alberta Hansard, 29th Legislature, 3rd Session, 12 December 2017, at page 2525.

[32] Robert E. Wanner (Speaker of the Legislative Assembly), “Government Bills and Orders: Third Reading – Bill 33, Electoral Divisions Act,” Alberta Hansard, 29th Legislature, 3rd Session, 13 December 2017, at pages 2565-2575.

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About J.W.J. Bowden

My area of academic expertise lies in Canadian political institutions, especially the Crown, political executive, and conventions of Responsible Government; since 2011, I have made a valuable contribution to the scholarship by having been published and cited extensively. I’m also a contributing editor to the Dorchester Review and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law.
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I invite reasonable questions and comments; all others will be prorogued or dissolved.