Changes to Electoral District Boundaries Will Deepen Our Problems - Fair Elections Would Heal Us (Mill Woods Mosaic May 2026)

By Tom Monto

(my article published in the May 2026 Mill Woods Mosaic)

The Alberta government recently announced that its MLAs will have direct influence in drawing the electoral districts that elects them. Such “gerrymandering”, as it is called, is possible due to the weaknesses of our election system. Instead of moving to fair election systems such as are used in Norway, Denmark and many other places, which would lighten the tone of our politics, the government is engaging in self-serving actions that will undoubtedly deepen our party-based polarization.

In our first past the post election system, sometimes only a handful of votes separates the winner from the second-place candidate. This slight difference, which makes all the difference between being elected to the Legislature and not, could be cancelled by new district boundaries. 

Due to several candidates running in a district, under FPTP it is common for a winner to be elected with less than half the votes in the district. If this happens in enough districts, a party with just a quarter of votes overall could take more than half the seats and grab power. Premiers Ralph Klein (in 2004) and Rachel Notley (in 2015) took a majority of seats in their respective Legislatures at a time when their parties received less than 47 percent of the vote. Those accidental results happened even without a government consciously drawing district boundaries to get advantage.

The UCP government’s gerrymandering might draw boundaries so as to "crack" NDP voters into small shards that are too small to win a seat. This would cause the NDP to lose seats it holds in Calgary and outside the major cities. Or where NDP vote is strong, such as Edmonton, new boundaries may concentrate Conservative voters into a few districts and thus eke out a few Conservative seats in Edmonton. Even if votes stay the same, a gerrymandered election might see the balance in the Legislature change from today’s UCP 49/NDP 38 ratio, to an unfair 59 UCP MLAs to 30 NDP MLAs. This prediction comes from Kyle Hutton, author of the online article “The Would-Be Alberta Gerrymander.”

Some other countries prevent gerrymandering by using existing jurisdictions, such as cities and counties, as districts and set the number of members in the district to ensure the appropriate ratio of voters to elected members. 

It is possible even in Canada to use multi-member districts and fairly set the number of seats in each district. But despite this opportunity, Alberta elections use arbitrary districts, where cities and counties are broken up and voters are sliced and diced in arbitrary groupings.

Our use of winner-take-all FPTP means there are great gains to be won by creative districting. If we had fair voting in each district - multiple members and each voter having one vote - the boundaries would have little effect. Each party would get its due share of seats in each district, no matter how boundaries are drawn.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, the Edmonton city corporate limits were used to form a district that elected 6 or so MLAs. There was no possibility for gerrymandering. In 1959, the Edmonton district was broken up into separate single-member districts. 

But even so, there has been the custom that city residents vote in different districts than their rural neighbours. Otherwise, city voters might drown out the less-numerous rural voters.  But now the UCP government is saying adjoining rural voters can be lumped in with city voters. So that opens the door to even freer drawing of districts.

A political party may enjoy a short period of power from such schemes, but most voters are not pleased to be under a government they did not vote for.  The ignored majority will work to ensure that they are not tricked again. 

According to one view, the Labour party currently in power in the United Kingdom is facing a collapse of its support even though it benefited massively from the winner-take-all election system in the last couple elections. 

Democracy is not about winning elections, or not only about that. It is about converting votes to seats in the legislature.

Say we look at Denmark, which uses a form of Proportional Representation. The whole country is divided into just ten districts. Most of the districts have between 11 and 20 members each. Each party gets its due share of seats in the district based on the votes it receives in the district.

Another 40 seats are given to parties that came up short in district elections.

However, the ten multi-member districts are so effective at producing fair representation that we have to go back to 2019 to find parties that were completely shut out in the district elections and had to be given several top-up seats. This was the Liberal party and the conservative Nye Borgerlige party. 

But in every election since, every party that received at least 1/175th of the votes cast (the Danish "house of commons" has 175 seats) got at least one seat in a district. The smaller parties did not suffer the total shut-out that  thinly-spread parties in Canada suffer. The smaller Danish parties did not get quite as many district seats as they deserved, and in those cases, Denmark's national-level top-up was used to give them a few more seats to bring their representation up to their share of the votes cast.

The Danish system and other such systems evolved over time due to recognition that no one party holds all the answers; that wise decisions are produced when all sides are considered; that no substantial chunk of the population should be completely ignored.

We see different values when we look at Alberta's political culture. Due to the present two-party dogfight in the Legislature, we seem to be on the road to more polarization and anger.

According to the book The Power of Collective Wisdom and the Trap of Collective Folly, by Alan Briskin and several others, there is wisdom when many put their heads together. But that collective wisdom can only come out when minds are open and ears are unstopped. Today in the Legislature, the polarization of the two-party fight means minds are closed. To some degree each party demonizes the other party, sees them as the other.

Each party - the UCP and the NDP - has substantial supporters and thus in the minds of many voters, each has some wisdom. But with the polarized politics, only one has power and the other is not listened to. The collective wisdom that Alberta as a whole has in reserve cannot come out when one party thinks it has all the answers.

Briskin's book says that without change, polarization deepens. The two main parties are drawn apart into mutually-hostile camps. And each party strives to appear to have internal unity. The parties stifle their supporters' natural desire to hold independent sentiment and vary from the party line based on their personal experiences. Alberta newspapers almost daily give us clear examples of how the UCP and the NDP are each attempting to form their Legislative caucuses and party members into unified fighting machines. The name of the United Conservative Party itself demonstrates this drive for unity.

While under Proportional Representation, each voter has the liberty to vote as they truly believe and new parties emerge where the numbers allow. Multi-party coalitions generally rule in PR countries, and there is natural fragmentation of the two-party polarization. Such an election system would soften Alberta’s party-based polarization and also the artificial regionalism that it suffers from.

And more than just closing its ears to wisdom held by NDP MLAs, the UCP government says it will disregard the stated opinion of great masses of voters. It recently disregarded the result of the 2023 referendum on daylight savings time, where a majority voted against permanent daylight savings. The collective wisdom of a referendum is more than the wisdom of 30 cabinet ministers, and more even than the wisdom of 49 elected UCP MLAs.

The government is also moving to restrict what teachers can teach and what lending libraries can lend and saying it may disregard the outcome of the referendums to be held in October.

While Denmark has its problems, at least its election system carefully and prudently converts votes cast into seats, and then afterwards some of the various parties form up into a governing coalition that reflects the aspirations of a majority of the voters.

While in Alberta (and other parts of Canada), a party representing just a minority of voters might grab most of the seats and wield power, pushing society in a direction that a majority of Albertans disagrees with. Majority rule and stable governments are the minimum goals of democracy, and in recent elections our FPTP system has not given us those things. Boundary changes could be positive things if they created multi-member districts, but changes that merely redraw single-seat districts in new ways can never produce democratic results.

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