Members of the Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission Julian Martin (right) and Greg Clark listen to presentations from the public during a hearing in Medicine Hat on Friday morning.--News Photo Collin Gallant
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Three former city MLAs agree: Medicine Hat and Brooks should be in different provincial ridings.
But a commission now contemplating changes to Alberta’s electoral districts told a public meeting Friday in the Hat that returning to pre-2019 boundaries isn’t a simple exercise.
The Alberta Election Boundaries Commission is currently touring the province to hear public feedback.
They have to add two ridings and adjust boundaries to level out population in others after the province gained nearly 800,000 people since the commission last sat in 2017.
At that time Medicine Hat’s two ridings – one completely urban and one comprising the wider region with a smaller portion of city voters – were redrawn as evenly split urban-rural ridings of Brooks-Medicine Hat and Cypress-Medicine Hat.
On Friday in the city, former MLA and speaker of the legislature Bob Wanner told the commission the Hat should again be the centre of a two-riding setup in the southeast corner, similar to the previous layout.
Wanner said Bow Island is historically and currently more closely related to Medicine Hat and Cypress County, in terms of water resources and highway connections, which are both expanding.
“In 2017, Medicine Hat became the only major city that has secondary status,” he said, referring to the naming of the riding that puts the Hat second, but also by linking half the population of the 63,000-person city with another population centre, namely Brooks.
“They are very good neighbours, but separate communities,” he argued.
Supporting the proposal were former Progressive Conservative MLA for the city riding, Rob Renner, and Jim Horsman, who were apprised of Wanner’s submission beforehand and showed up in person to endorse it.
“As hard as it is for me to agree with an NDPer, I do,” Horsman told the five-member commission.
He was first elected as MLA for “Medicine Hat-Redcliff” in 1975 and retired as the riding became a city-only voting district in 1993.
Wanner’s idea was a matter of non-partisan fairness, he said.
Renner, the PC MLA for “Medicine Hat” from 1993 to 2012, also agreed.
“It was a mistake to take away Forty Mile and substitute Brooks (in 2019),” said Renner, who now lives in Canmore.
“I understand why it was done, but it makes the riding very difficult to represent.”
The commission is convened every two election cycles to adjust boundaries, with an interest in keeping general population levels within them even, while considering history, transportation links, natural boundaries and common interests.
Changes brought in for the 2019 vote – when the population of Alberta was just more than 4 million – required ridings to have about 47,000 residents, resulting in Brooks joining a northern Medicine Hat riding, and the County of Forty Mile joining Taber-Warner, while voters in southern Medicine Hat voted along side Cypress County residents.
In 2025, Alberta is estimated to reach 4.8 million, which in 89 ridings would set a target of 55,000, though 25 per cent above or below is allowable.
Wanner says a return to the pre-2017 layout would set each riding’s population at about 45,000.
AEBC member Greg Clark said municipalities like Red Deer and Lethbridge are easily split into two urban ridings because of their 100,000 person population.
“Medicine Hat is growing, but we’re not there yet, so we’ll have to have some sort of carve out (of a portion) either way,” he said.
Lethbridge lawyer John Evans, who grew up in Brooks and practices law down Highway 3, noted the single chamber of commerce representing both Brooks and Medicine Hat, Medicine Hat College operating campuses in both cities and that shopping is a major draw.
Commission member Julian Martin was receptive but said “it may be possible, but we’re in a game of incremental change (on the map), and these are two centres (Brooks and Medicine Hat) that are showing incremental (population) growth.”
Hatter Dan Hein is a member of UCP’s Brooks-Medicine Hat constituency association and testified in Brooks on Thursday about the benefits of blended ridings.
He said the Brooks meeting was uneventful, but across the province there appears to be a “steady drum beat” of keeping rural and urban areas out of the same ridings, which he feels is the wrong approach.
“Having rural and urban together serves two purposes,” he told the News. “It compels an MLA to hear both sides of issues, and makes them a better MLA, and there are corners of Calgary and Edmonton that are having explosive growth. Why not subdivide those areas and expand out into other areas that are not going to grow as fast?”
In practical terms, most political observers tend to feel that a blended riding may favour conservative chances as they add traditionally right-of-centre rural voters to a more progressive urban voting pool.
In Medicine Hat, Wanner won a very tight three-way election in the strictly urban riding in 2017 – a breakthrough for the New Democrats – but didn’t run for re-election in the 2019 configuration. Since then his party has boasted about a stronger vote count at urban polling stations, but has lost two general elections and a local byelection by clear majorities to United Conservative Party candidates.
