Hat Area Ridings Proposed to Remain Unchanged

Commissioners Susan Samson and John Evans with Cypress Medicine Hat MLA Justin Wright during the Electoral Boundaries Commission’s June hearings in Medicine Hat. (File photo)

The province’s Electoral Boundary Commission is releasing its interim proposal for ridings as Alberta is adding two additional seats for the next election.

“The Commission elected to leave the two Medicine Hat electoral divisions mostly unchanged,” stated the interim report.

The report, tabled in the Alberta Legislature on Tuesday, is part of a legislated review of ridings with the latest commission tasked with rejigging the electoral boundaries to accommodate 89 seats.

The biggest proposed change for Medicine Hat’s two ridings is their names.

“It is recommended that “Medicine Hat” go before “Brooks” or “Cypress” in the names of those two electoral divisions,” stated the report. “Medicine Hat is otherwise the only city of its size in Alberta that does not appear at the beginning of an electoral division’s name, and it cannot be found on an alphabetical list of electoral divisions.”

Other changes would be to include all of Cypress County within the proposed Medicine Hat-Cypress riding while keeping the County of 40-Mile within Cardston-Taber-Warner.

The commission heard local submissions regarding returning Medicine Hat to having its own urban riding but rejected that idea.

“We also note that the pragmatic consequence of having a Medicine Hat electoral division that is purely urban would be an enormously large geographic territory—essentially, all territory in Brooks-Medicine Hat and Cypress-Medicine Hat not in the City of Medicine Hat—being united in a single electoral division with the remnants of Medicine Hat,” stated the report. “This did not strike us as an ideal way to achieve effective representation.”

The report states the two Medicine Hat ridings would be nearly at the provincial average with the Brooks seat 54,898 residents with Cypress representing 54,144 Albertans.