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Keith Gerein: Edmonton could lose out in UCP's anti-democratic electoral boundaries move

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.

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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.

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That’s when my phone buzzed with a call from a friend in Ontario who I hadn’t heard from in awhile. 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........

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