Alberta NDP’s election rigging warning is ‘tinfoil hat’ talk, provincial justice minister says

It’s “ridiculous” for the Alberta NDP to charge that the UCP is opening the door to “cheating and election rigging” in the way it’s approaching the Alberta electoral boundaries commission’s final report, says the provincial justice minister.

“There’s been no indication whatsoever, from anybody, that we are anywhere past looking at, studying the report, taking it in, looking at the recommendations,” Mickey Amery told reporters Tuesday. 

“You know, this is a typical tinfoil hat positioning from the NDP leader.”

Alberta NDP Opposition leader Naheed Nenshi said Tuesday the government was opening the door to “political interference” that would alter the implementation of an independent process.

“Anything short of implementing the majority report in its entirety is election rigging,” Nenshi wrote in a statement Tuesday. 

The five-member electoral boundaries commission is appointed every eight to 10 years to decide where to position electoral boundaries.

After months of hearings across the province, the latest commission released its final report last week. The commission was made up of two members appointed by the government, two from the opposition, and a retired judge chosen by Premier Danielle Smith’s cabinet.

This commission had been tasked with redrawing Alberta’s electoral map amid Alberta’s population boom, most of which has been concentrated in provincial urban centres.

To deal with that growth, the report suggested the province remove two rural seats from central and north central Alberta to meet the demands of high population in and around Calgary and Edmonton.

But the report also included a “minority report,” authored by the two UCP appointees, and which, for the first time, released a series of competing maps. The minority report suggested combining parts of Calgary and Edmonton with rural Alberta.

On Monday, Amery was asked how the government would approach the competing minority report. He said the government was assessing the report and “looking at all the options.”

“I don’t think that I have a full answer of where we’re going with this right now,” he said. 

“One of the things that I found quite interesting was some of the recommendations in that report, including the chair’s report about the number of seats, is something that we’d have to consider as well.”

The report stated that the majority believed they would have been able to provide Albertans with more effective representation had the legislature allocated an additional two seats, to 91. 

Prior to the work of the commission, the government added two new ridings, increasing the total number of seats in the legislature from 87 to 89. 

Amery was then asked whether his comments meant the government was considering bumping the seat count to 91.

“All options are open,” he said.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Nenshi said the independent commission had “one recommendation.”

“Take the other options off the table, Justice Minister. Setting up a UCP committee to look at the report is not an option,” Nenshi said. 

“The only option is to accept the independent commission’s report. And if he were to say that, I would happily doff my tinfoil hat.”

Nenshi said the minority report’s proposed alternative maps were “hopelessly gerrymandered.”

“So, if they were to adopt the minority report, or if they were to set up a new commission and try again to get a better answer, we’ll take them to court,” Nenshi said.

Alberta’s boundary commissions have included minority reports before, in 2010 and 2017, but individual commissioners did not redraw the maps. 

In the most recent report, Dallas Miller, the retired justice who chaired the commission, wrote that the minority’s report was “unconstitutional” and said the majority wished to “warn the legislature against its adoption.”

Keith Archer, who served on the 2010 Alberta commission and was chief electoral officer in B.C., noted that the commission makes its recommendations to the government, and then it’s up to the government to either adopt the recommendations or make changes to them.

“The government still has the final say on what is accepted and what is passed by the legislative assembly, but the government typically acts on the recommendation of the electoral boundaries commission,” he told CBC News last year.

“The idea behind having an electoral boundaries commission is to do this as an administrative procedure, not a political procedure.”

Amery noted Tuesday that the report is several hundred pages long. He said the government was studying comments from the chair, the majority and the minority.

“No government discussions have taken place thus far about this. This will have to wait until it gets into the assembly, where the members of the legislative assembly will debate. That’s what the process is all about,” he said.