One recent evening, in an attempt to improve a mood laid low by the Oilers' playoff results, I found myself watching YouTube clips of a favoured old Steve Martin movie. That's when my phone buzzed with a call from a friend in Ontario who I hadn't heard from in a while. We exchanged a few pleasantries, and he asked if he was interrupting anything important. I replied in the negative, telling him that I was just watching a few clips from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. There was a brief pause on the line, after which my friend asked, jokingly, if it was a documentary about the UCP government's efforts to gerrymander Alberta's electoral districts.
I laughed, but not really at the joke, which wasn't particularly clever. Instead, I was amused that my friend had never heard of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels — a 1988 dark comedy about a pair of con men — and, secondly, that he HAD heard of the gerrymandering accusations. Yes, that bit of Alberta news has even found its way through the fog of the self-absorbed Toronto news cycle. In truth, the movie's title is not a term that I ever want to use in political discourse. That, and other similar descriptors of general slimeballery are best left for rankings of Game of Throne characters, Bond villains and pro-sports commissioners.
But I do understand the anger that underlies the use of such words, especially here in Edmonton, which seems to be disproportionately hurt by the province's meddling in elections. I've been struggling for a term to describe the pattern, but then fellow Alberta journalist Jen Gerson finally said it last week — democratic vandalism.
Pattern of Defacement
What is meant by that? For starters, it was this UCP crew that chose to contaminate municipal elections in Calgary and Edmonton with political parties, corporate donations and mandatory hand-counting of ballots. It's the same group that unnecessarily delayed Edmonton byelections last year. They introduced rules for citizen-led referenda, then selectively changed them to accommodate the separatist movement. And going back to the Jason Kenney era, it was his UCP government that abruptly got rid of the elections commissioner in the midst of investigations into that party. Since then there have been other legislative changes to tighten the scope of investigations that may have stymied Elections Alberta from probing and stopping what appears to be a massive breach of Alberta's voter database.
With that track record, it's been clear for a while that the UCP sees few democratic norms as untouchable, and yet I had been naively hoping that they wouldn't go to the extent of interfering with redistricting, which is arguably more sacred territory. Here in Alberta we have kept gerrymandering temptations mostly at bay by handing redistricting duties over to a supposedly independent Electoral Boundaries Commission. The process is never completely free of controversy, but it generally works. The commission meets every two or three election cycles, does their best to draw a fair map that reflects population changes, and the government of the day accepts it.
Just as we don't want politicians setting their own salaries, it is even more vital that they be prevented from picking their own voters. Premier Danielle Smith and Justice Minister Mickey Amery talked about information related to the fall referendum on Thursday, April 23, 2026. Edmonton could lose out in the UCP's anti-democratic electoral boundaries move.
