Smith's Power Plays Depend on These Hand-Picked Appointees Who is Brian O'Ferrall? A panel further tilted UCP UCP's picks to figure the cost of separation Does the public care?
Jun 17, 2026•14 min•Ep. 9
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Episode description
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Read more:
Alberta
Analysis
Alberta
Analysis
Analysis
Analysis
Alberta
Think redrawing ridings and pricing separation are jobs for impartial experts? Here are the UCP choices.
Charles Rusnell
17 Jun 2026
17 Jun 2026The Tyee
Charles Rusnell is an independent investigative reporter based in Edmonton.
Our journalism is supported by readers like you. Click here to support The Tyee.
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Think redrawing ridings and pricing separation are jobs for impartial experts? Here are the UCP choices. … Article written by Charles Rusnell.
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."
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.
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 — and one beneficiary was O'Ferrall.
A 2015 investigation by Globe and Mail reporter Sean Fine detailed how Harper had sought to stack the judiciary ...
49
49
Read more:
Alberta
Analysis
Alberta
Analysis
Analysis
Analysis
Alberta
Think redrawing ridings and pricing separation are jobs for impartial experts? Here are the UCP choices.
Charles Rusnell
17 Jun 2026
17 Jun 2026The Tyee
Charles Rusnell is an independent investigative reporter based in Edmonton.
Our journalism is supported by readers like you. Click here to support The Tyee.
URL copied to clipboard!
SHARE:
68
SHARES
Comments
/
New
Think redrawing ridings and pricing separation are jobs for impartial experts? Here are the UCP choices. … Article written by Charles Rusnell.
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."
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.
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 — and one beneficiary was O'Ferrall.
A 2015 investigation by Globe and Mail reporter Sean Fine detailed how Harper had sought to stack the judiciary ...
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