Drawing the Line Against Gerrymandering
Why the Alberta Government Should Reject the "Minority Report"
The Government of Alberta should accept the Electoral Boundaries Commission’s report and reject the minority map appended to it. Full stop.
The majority recommendations add two ridings in Calgary and one in Edmonton, and make the difficult adjustments that Alberta’s population growth now demands.
By contrast, the minority proposal from the two UCP-appointed commissioners relies far more heavily on hybrid urban-rural ridings while mitigating against the loss of rural seats.
This is, to my knowledge, the only time in Canadian history that a dissenting opinon has been included in a boundaries commission report. These are typically consensus documents.
Proponents of the minority report would have us believe this is a rural versus urban debate, or that it centres around genuine disagreements over what it means to be “effectively represented.” Even casual observers can see it for what it is: an attempt to gerrymander Alberta’s electoral map to the advantage of the governing party.
I say this not simply as an academic or a citizen, but as someone who had the privilege of chairing Edmonton’s first citizen-led boundaries commission. Through that process, I learned that redistricting is about far more than drawing lines on a map. In fact, given the strict parameters of the process, commissioners don’t actually have a lot of latitude to pull out the sharpie and conjure up new borders.
Rather, when done right, redistricting involves a great deal of public engagement. Beyond esoteric or partisan considerations about whose vote should count more or less, it’s about listening to residents’ views about representation and communities of interest.
In engaging with thousands of Edmontonians, our commission found that people can live with compromise. They can live with trade-offs. What they cannot live with is the suspicion that the rules were bent after the fact to protect one side.
And that’s what gerrymandering is: when governments stop letting voters choose their representatives and start choosing their voters instead. This is endemic to the United States. Alberta should not take us further down that road by caving to the minority report writers.
There are worrying signs that the UCP may not take this approach, however. They have made a habit of reforming democratic institutions in ways that erode citizens’ access to effective representation. After establishing new voter ID laws, the government announced mandatory citizenship markers on provincial ID, explicitly tying the change to preventing election fraud for which there is no evidence. Redistricting and voter verification rules are different tools, but they express the same political temptation: to narrow, sort, and control the electorate in the false pursuit of “electoral integrity” or “fairness”.
The first step should be to reject gerrymandering and accept the recommendations of the boundaries commission. The second should be to pursue larger reforms to the redistricting process.
To prevent this sort of thing from happening again, Alberta’s redistribution process should be made non-partisan, not merely bipartisan. Right now, the province’s commission is structured so that two members are nominated by the opposition and two by the government, with only the chair standing above that split. We have better models available.
Manitoba uses an independent boundaries commission made up of the Chief Justice, the Chief Electoral Officer, and ex-officio university leaders, with public hearings and no party-nominated members.
Federally, Canada uses independent commissions in each province, chaired by a judge, with the other members appointed by the Speaker of the House of Commons.
In England, boundary commissioners operate outside direct ministerial control, with judicial and open public-appointment elements.
In Australia, redistributions are decided by an augmented Electoral Commission composed of electoral officials and statutory office-holders, not party nominees.
Alberta should lift and adapt from those systems and build a process designed to keep partisan incentives at arm’s length from the very start.
The immediate decision, though, is simple. Accept the commission’s report. Reject the minority map and the hyperpartisan premise on which it is based. Then fix the process so that no future government, of any stripe, is tempted to choose its voters before voters choose it.
I see where the examples of commissions outsite the Republic of Oilberta, use judges as part of the decision making system. Perhaps our Premieress will adopt that system once she convices Ottawa that only she should choose who is a judge in Alberta. As she says, that way they would understand the unique values of Albertans.
I think this government sees the 'common values of Albertans' as being what the UCP. APP and the other supporters value. Danerous stuff for democracy.
As someone captured by the gerrymandered map there’s not a hope in hell I want the radicalized alt right of my rural riding potentially overwhelming an urban vote.
Win fair Dani, try not screwing around with everything you touch