February 2, 2023
Alberta has 37 ridings now, gaining 3 from the previous redistribution, the biggest gain in the country. There's an average population/electoral district of 115,206. Alberta is a rapidly growing province often seeing some of the biggest jumps in redistribution seat gains. The commissions previously have not accounted for this and neither has this one. The biggest examples of this have been Calgary Skyview with a 2021 population of 159,642 (+43.6% deviation from the Electoral Quotient), Calgary Shepard with a population of 163,447 (+47%), and Edmonton Wetaskiwin with a population of a shocking 209,431 (+88.4%). I'm worried that this will be repeated by the next redistribution in 10 years.
Proposal
Around Edmonton, ridings got significantly smaller and closer to Edmonton to account for the jump in population around the city. Generally, I think most of these changes are good, as rurban ridings can be difficult to represent because of the massive differences in suburbs and rural areas in a riding. I think the decision to split Sherwood Park-Fort Saskatchewan into Lakeland and Sherwood Park-Beaumont was weird because of how big of a riding Lakeland is.
Within Edmonton, the decision to make Edmonton Griesbach more Conservative and significantly taller I found quite weird as the riding was no longer as centred around the Griesbach area. I liked the change to Edmonton Centre though as it made it much more centred in the city, which for a riding named [city] Centre makes sense. In southwestern Edmonton, the split of Edmonton Mill Woods I found quite strange was split almost evenly in half with one riding still being named after it.
I liked seeing Red Deer forming its own riding as the splitting of so many cities in the west of Canada continues to baffle me as there are many instances where the city could form its own riding, like Red Deer for example, but has been split.
In the Calgary area, I liked the 2 smaller ridings, Canmore-Cochrane-Olds, and Airdrie-Chestermere, being created.
Within Calgary, many names stayed consistent with current ridings, while borders saw both minor and major shifts. I don't like the Calgary names but the ones that were picked are generally ok.
If you look at the farthest corners of each city you can see that not much changed in terms of how many seats were allocated. A closer look at the riding of Calgary Mindapore in the proposal shows this quite clearly. You can see the areas with the suburbs in Calgary and how much space there is undeveloped near the edges. This is what has led to massive deviations from the Electoral Quotient because commissions in Alberta consistently ignore this.
In rural parts of the province, ridings got more compact, with simpler shapes and the splitting of Banff-Airdrie into previously mentioned Canmore-Cochrane-Olds and Yellowhead, one of the biggest ridings in the Prairies.
Report
The Alberta Report still failed to make the necessary preparations for another continued increase in population over the next decade, particularly in Calgary where they reversed much of the changes they made to ridings and reverted many of them almost completely to their current borders, which was disappointing.
Many changes in the area between and around Calgary and Edmonton are generally good in my opinion. Especially the ridings of Leduc-Wetaskiwin and Parkland. I dislike how they left Sherwood Park-Fort Saskatchewan the same as it's even above the increased Electoral Quotient with this redistribution.
Within Edmonton, a lot of the changes to Griesbach and Centre were luckily reversed. Something I almost missed was the weird jump across the river to include the Windermere area in Edmonton West as opposed to Edmonton Riverbend.
In the rural areas, the most notable change was the split of Banff-Airdrie into Jasper-Banff-Canmore, basically a version of Yellowhead that doesn't cut into Parkland. Other than that, and some weird flip-flopping in the northwest, the rural areas of the province reverted almost completely back to the current borders.
People I've talked to have generally been in favour of this map as it wasn't as particularly revolting as the proposal. I would prefer a focus on not having ridings above deviations of 40% being the norm in a decade. The maps below outline what I'd ideally like to have seen in the report to accommodate for these massive increases in future populations.
Political Impact
Alberta is one of the most Conservative provinces in the country so most ridings do stay Conservative. The notable exceptions in the real 2021 election were Calgary Skyview (Largely Calgary McKnight in the new map) which went Liberal, and Edmonton Centre flips from a tight Liberal win to the Conservatives that would've been reelected in this map. Edmonton Strathcona, one of the safest NDP seats in Canada, unsurprisingly, stays NDP. Edmonton Griesbach absorbed safe Conservative areas in the initial proposal but it was largely reversed in the report which flipped the seat back to the NDP.
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