Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) isn’t even trying to fake it any more.
They bulled ahead in the Legislature this week with a scheme to dump the report of the Electoral Boundaries Commission and replace the bi-partisan body with a special select committee stacked with UCP MLAs to cook up a gerrymandered electoral map designed to guarantee the government an election victory whenever the next provincial election is held.
The measure to toss out the EBC report and hurry up with Texas-style gerrymandering passed 44 to 36.
With that detail out of the way, apparently clueless Leduc-Beaumont UCP MLA Brandon Lunty will be entrusted with the job of leading the committee to its predetermined conclusion and reporting back to the Legislature by Nov. 2, a timeframe that is technically known in Parliamentary terminology as a big fat hurry.
The fact Lunty had trouble last Thursday making a single talking point sound even vaguely credible obviously doesn’t matter – this train has already left the station and the government doesn’t give a hoot if we all know that the fixeroo is in.
The committee’s job is not just to consider redrawing the electoral map to include 91 ridings instead of the 89 the real EBC was limited to by the same Legislature, but to ensure that as many urban ridings likely to vote NDP as possible are divided into pizza slices with enough rural and semi-rural votes to ensure the UCP always wins.
So never mind Texas, in case you missed it, this is a significant part of the way Stephen Harper’s pal Viktor Orbán’s far-right Christian nationalist party managed to win four supermajorities in a row in the Hungarian Parliament before finally being tossed on April 12. In the process he became Hungary’s longest serving prime minister.
Naturally, the NDP protested mightily in the Assembly yesterday, but the government swatted aside the Opposition’s complaints with obvious contempt.
How did the two UCP-appointed members of the EBC come up with a set of maps for the entire province in two weeks, Opposition Leader Naheed Nenshi asked Premier Danielle Smith. Smith responded with a characteristic head-wagging, arm-waving sneer: “The members opposite should take our AI Academy, because then they’d learn how to use the marvels of modern technology as well so that they can develop their own maps!”
Indeed. I absolutely believe they likely did just that. The prompt undoubtedly read something like this: “Hey, Grok, how do you gerrymander the $#&% out of Alberta?”
The irony, of course, is that the UCP probably won’t need to cheat to win an election next year. With its solid base in rural Alberta and enough supporters in Calgary to push it over the top in most elections, it is probably capable of winning a fair fight. It’s interesting, and significant, that it no longer appears willing to take the chance of losing control of the narrative leading up to its favoured separatist referendum next fall and whatever happens after that.
Speaking of which, Lunty, also charged with reviewing Citizen Initiative proposals, yesterday refused to let the proponent of last year’s the successful Forever Canadian petition make a presentation, despite a passionate appeal from former Progressive Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk.
It’s quite clear that the government intends to run out the clock on the Forever Canadian petition, signed by close to half a million Albertans, to keep it off the ballot in October and make way for an unconstitutional question by a separatist group allied with the UCP, which, even after a rule change designed to lower the bar for it under Alberta’s “citizen initiative” legislation, seems to be having considerably less success gathering signatures than the Forever Canadian effort.
In addition, as predicted many times in this space would happen, media reported yesterday that a study by the Canadian Digital Media Research Network has discovered a misinformation and disinformation campaign by mysteriously funded pro-separation “network of inauthentic YouTube channels posing as Albertan voices.”
The analysis “found roughly 20 channels working in a co-ordinated way, amassing nearly 40 million views while presenting themselves as grassroots commentary from within the province,” CTV News said.
Even if we don’t know who’s paying for it, though, it’s probably not necessary to sign up for the UCP’s “AI Academy” to have a pretty good idea where this dishonest digital slop is being generated.
Meanwhile, a commentary by former Alberta NDP premier Rachel Notley appeared in The Globe and Mail, arguing accurately enough that “the UCP is cheating to secure themselves a supermajority.”
In the article, though, Notley complained about how the Electoral Boundaries Committee she appointed in 2016 turned two strong NDP seats into one, turned another into a rurban pizza slice, and all but eliminated another in northern Alberta.
“The proposal was not one anyone could suggest had the best interests of the Alberta NDP in mind,” Notley wrote. “Nonetheless, I can say, with utter certainty, that at no time did I even casually consider abusing my power as premier or our legislative majority to reverse the work of the boundaries commission. We fully understood that an independent boundaries commission was as integral to our democracy as the election itself.”
The NDP, alas, paralyzed by its fear of igniting another Bill 6 brouhaha, failed to fix the errors obviously made by the 2016 EBC, as it should have.
