Conservatives in Alberta have their knives out.
A conservative premier hasn't finished a full term in two decades, and Danielle Smith is ready to do anything, including straight-up cheating, to break that streak.
Alberta will never be independent as long as we have a federalist leading the United Conservative Party of Alberta.
Hundreds of thousands of members and volunteers are going to be committed to, you know, taking back ownership of the United Conservative Party of Alberta.
That's Jeffrey Rath, separatist-in-chief. He wants Smith gone.
The leopards, apparently, are getting ready to eat some faces.
The fire she stoked
But Smith is not a victim here. She courted and enabled separatism again and again.
She changed the rules to make it easier for separatists to trigger a referendum, then put separation on the ballot herself after the courts blocked the separatists' question.
Now she's struggling to control the fire that she stoked.
Jason Kenney said it in 2022, right before the party stabbed him in the back.
"I will not let this mainstream conservative party become an agent for extreme, hateful, intolerant, bigoted and crazy views," he said. "The lunatics are trying to take over the asylum. And I'm not going to let them."
Well, they did.
The insurance policy
The separatists want her gone, and the election is coming up next October. So Smith is cashing in her insurance policy.
The independent boundaries commission, chaired by a judge her own government appointed, handed in a map of the boundaries for the next election. Her two appointees wrote a dissent that sliced Calgary, Lethbridge, Red Deer and Airdrie into “rurban” ridings that dilute city voters by overwhelming them with rural ones.
The judge said it likely violates the Charter, noting:
We are of the view that the minority’s proposed maps violate the principle of procedural fairness, unreasonably apply the statutory considerations, and likely violate s. 3 of the Charter.
What might be the minority’s true motivation for this? Our friends south of the border may have a term for this type of redistricting.
So she threw the map out. Dozens of public hearings, 2,000 submissions, gone.
Her UCP majority committee stacked the new panel with a UCP donor, a Conservative lobbyist, and a gerrymandering enthusiast.
There were no public hearings this time.
The new map will be presented to the Legislature by November 2nd, but it'll probably leak before then.
I will bet you an entire Heritage Fund it doesn't look anything like the map Albertans asked for.
Chopping up the cities
Alberta's conservative dynasty started with Peter Lougheed when he won the cities, wresting control from the rural-focused Social Credit Party.
The movement that took control by courting cities now wants to hold onto that control by chopping them up.
The Americans call it gerrymandering. I'm calling it what it is:
Danielle Smith's cheat-to-win election.
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