Danielle Smith is desperate. Her government’s decision to engage in blatant US-style gerrymandering of the province’s electoral maps is just the latest sign of how far it’s willing to go to protect its hold on political power. Worse, it might actually work. If the courts hold up her new maps, after all, she’ll have built a wall of rural voters around urban Calgary and Lethbridge ridings that were set to fall to the NDP in the next election. If it overturns those maps, she gets to rail against unelected judges and the tyranny of Laurentian elites. Win-win, right? 

I’m not so sure. Maybe this is the optimism around the US midterm elections spilling across the digital border, but I think Smith has — once again — overplayed her hand. First and foremost, there’s the fact that this reeks of weakness, not strength — and that this is a consistent political odor coming from this government. As University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley writes on his Substack, this is just the latest attempt by the Smith government to rewrite the political rules in ways that favour their interests. They lowered the thresholds on citizen initiatives (and, apparently, collaborated with petitioners) and removed the need for supporters to collect signatures in urban areas. They changed the campaign finance rules in municipal elections, and when that didn’t produce the outcome they wanted in the subsequent elections, have........

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