'Rurban' ridings on the minds of Albertans as electoral boundary meetings conclude

During a Thursday afternoon meeting earlier this month in Brooks, Alta., Justice Dallas Miller, chair of Alberta's new electoral boundaries commission, outlined the central challenge facing the panel.

As Alberta's population now nears five million, most of it concentrated in its urban centres, the commission must decide how to redraw the electoral map ahead of the next provincial election.

"The population growth, as you know, has not been spread evenly across the province," Miller told attendees, according to transcripts released from the hearing. 

"We have some challenges, and are hearing from municipalities and areas where there has been huge growth, on how we deal with that growth."

The question of where new lines should be drawn has long been a point of debate in Alberta politics, with disagreement around what's fair for both growing urban centres and vast rural areas.

The commission held public hearings in late May and throughout June in Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Red Deer and other communities. They wrapped up earlier this week.

Like Canada's other Prairie provinces, there has been a notably stark urban-rural divide in Alberta in recent provincial elections. The United Conservative Party has dominated in the rural parts of the province, but performed less impressively in the province's two major cities.

Electoral boundaries are significant, of course, as they determine which grouping of voters elects each member of the Legislative Assembly to the Alberta Legislature.

Every eight to 10 years, a five-member commission is appointed to decide where these lines go. 

This time around, the province is adding two new ridings, increasing the total number of seats in the legislature from 87 to 89. 

But one other change may have a longer-term impact, in that the commission is no longer required to align ridings with municipal boundaries. That could open the door to more mixed rural-urban ridings. 

Lisa Young, a political science professor at the University of Calgary, said electoral boundaries are intended to try to keep "communities of interest" together — that is, people who might share the same concerns or perspectives because of where they live.

"One of the most significant cleavages in contemporary politics is between rural and urban dwellers. Their concerns tend to be different and they often have different perspectives on politics," Young wrote in an email.

"It's difficult to make an argument that an electoral district that combines urban and rural really captures communities of interest because of these differences."