How will Alberta’s ridings be reshaped and who will draw the lines? The answers could affect the outcome of future elections for generations. But New Democrats claim Premier Danielle Smith has brazenly tilted the scales in her party’s favour.
So who has the United Conservative Party government put in charge of the controversial process and what reassurance can citizens take from their backgrounds?
If, that is, Albertans aren’t worn out by what one expert calls Smith’s “flood-the-zone” barrage of contentious political moves.
First, Smith’s government effectively rejected the majority report of an independent electoral boundaries commission that had spent a year on public hearings and reviewed more than 1,140 submissions, at a cost of more than a million dollars.
Then, the UCP appointed three of the five members of a panel to conduct another review. Except this one will be carried out behind closed doors with no public input, at an additional cost of a half-million dollars.
The NDP has accused the UCP of setting the table for gerrymandering, changing the riding boundaries to favour the UCP.
Their fears were bolstered when the UCP-dominated Select Special Committee on Electoral Boundaries met last week. Every motion advanced by the two NDP committee members in an attempt to increase transparency and prevent inappropriate political contact with panel members was voted down.
“The entire process is illegitimate,” Calgary NDP MLA Kathleen Ganley told reporters after the meeting. “What I think became incredibly clear today is that the UCP intends to cheat,” she said.
NDP house leader Christina Gray, too, called the process “illegitimate” as well as “likely unconstitutional.” She reminded that “even the acting chief justice of Alberta flagged it as irregular.”
Who is Brian O’Ferrall?
Facing such stormy waters, the UCP chose retired Calgary Court of Appeal Judge Brian O’Ferrall to chair the panel. He was one of only two applicants for the job.
Why was the field that small? Citing “the irregularity of this process,” acting chief justice Dawn Pentelechuk had declined a request from UCP MLA Brandon Lunty, the select committee’s chair, to distribute a job notice to sitting and former judges. The Law Society of Alberta and the Canadian Bar Association also declined to distribute the notice.
A review of donation databases dating back to the early 1990s reveals O’Ferrall has been a reliable and generous financial supporter of both Alberta and federal conservative parties in the decades before and years after he served as a provincial civil court small claims judge and then as a justice with Alberta’s highest court after Stephen Harper leapfrogged him to the Court of Appeal in 2011.
O’Ferrall’s first donation after retiring from the bench in 2022 was to the Calgary-Elbow UCP riding association. Now in his late 70s, O’Ferrall served as the official campaign agent for former Alberta premier Ralph Klein in that same riding for the 1993 and 1997 elections.
O’Ferrall donated another $1,000 to the UCP in 2024 and $1,287.50 in 2025.
His career took a big jump thanks to Harper.
Smith has demanded more input in how higher court judges are selected to better reflect what she says are the province’s values and “distinct legal traditions.” But a decade ago, Harper took matters into his own hands.
A 2015 investigation by Globe and Mail reporter Sean Fine detailed how Harper had sought to stack the judiciary with right-leaning judges.
A source told Fine the Harper government took “deliberate steps,” at least in Alberta, to evade appointment committees because they sometimes stood in the way of judges it wished to appoint.
“Those tended to be right-of-centre judges with a known track record,” Fine wrote.
A judge already appointed to a lower provincial court could not be vetted by a federal judicial committee, so Harper created an “express lane” to bypass the committee.
And this, Fine wrote, is how O'Ferrall, a provincial court judge, “made an unusual leap straight to Alberta's highest court, the Court of Appeal, in 2011.”
“This is not against the rules,” Fine stressed. “The appointments system has wide discretion.”
A former Court of King’s Bench justice, who knows O’Ferrall personally, said the sense among judges when he was appointed to the Appeal Court was that he would struggle with the workload and the wide variety of legal work “since his practice was largely environmental law” and his work at the provincial court was as a small claims judge, which “is pretty low key.”
“I don’t think there is any thought that he was overly friendly to conservative governments or hostile to liberal ones,” said the former justice, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“He was a free thinker and small-c conservative in his writing — no scandals or controversies,” he said, adding that he was surprised that O’Ferrall took the job.
“It is thankless and will drag him into the public eye.”
O’Ferrall declined an interview request.
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