Town Shapes of Canada

Alberta riding shapes: current map and the 2026 proposals

Every provincial riding (electoral division) in Alberta, scored with the same compactness number the towns get: Polsby-Popper, 4π × area ÷ perimeter². A circle scores 1. A long or wiggly shape heads toward 0. On the left is the current 87-riding map, in force since 2019. On the right is one of the two 89-riding maps the Electoral Boundaries Commission proposed in March 2026. Tap a riding on either map to see it next to the riding that covers most of the same ground on the other map.

Read this before you share a number. A low score is not evidence of anything on its own. Riding lines usually follow things that are already there: the Continental Divide and national park lines in the mountains, rivers, county and municipal borders, First Nations reserves, and the rule that ridings hold roughly equal numbers of people. Any of those can make a fair riding look spidery. A compact riding can still be drawn to help one side. This score can't tell those cases apart. This page measures shape and nothing else, and it takes no side in the boundaries debate.

Which maps are here. The Legislature voted on April 16, 2026 to set the commission's majority map aside and gave the job to an MLA committee, which is moving toward 91 ridings. That committee's map was due to the Legislature by November 2, 2026. It had not been released as data when this page was built, so it isn't here yet. It will be scored the same way once it is published. The commission's two maps are shown because they are the only proposed maps available as boundary files.

City share. Each riding also shows how many of its people live inside a city, using the 2021 census. It counts people, not land, because a riding that is mostly farmland by area can still be mostly city residents by count. Every one of Alberta's 68,167 census blocks is placed in the riding that holds its Statistics Canada centre point, and the block's own municipality says whether it is in a city. Three numbers are given: in a city (Alberta's 19 cities), in a city, town or village, and built-up (any Statistics Canada population centre, 1,000+ people living close together, rural or not). Sherwood Park and Fort McMurray are hamlets inside Strathcona County and Wood Buffalo, not cities, so they show 0% city but close to 100% built-up. A mixed riding is not evidence of anything on its own either: equal population per riding and county lines often force a city's edge in with its neighbours. These shares use 2021 census counts; the commission balanced its maps on a July 2024 estimate, so the two population figures differ.

Right-hand map:

Riding compactness (scale stretched to the riding range)

0.15 spidery0.80 compact

Tap a riding on either map.

Every riding, with its score and source:

Sources. Current map: Elections Alberta, 2019 ED shapefiles. Commission maps: Elections Alberta's own boundary files (EBC2025_Boundaries_Apr092026 and Minority_Report_Boundaries). Elections Alberta sent them to a researcher on request on May 6, 2026, and they are republished in Will Conner's boundaries audit under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, so this page's riding data (ridings.json) is shared on the same terms. Report and maps: Commission final report (PDF). Scores use the full-detail boundaries in Statistics Canada Lambert (EPSG:3347), the same projection the town scores use. All three files are drawn at similar detail (about one point every 90 m), so the scores compare fairly. Population is the commission's figure, the Alberta Office of Statistics and Information's July 2024 estimate (4,888,723 province-wide, report section III), and isn't in the 2019 file. City shares: Statistics Canada 2021 census Geographic Attribute File (block populations and municipalities, 4,262,635 people) and the block centre points from the 2021 dissemination block layer. 113 blocks on reserves that weren't fully counted in 2021 have no figure and count as zero. Map shapes are simplified to 150 m for display only.

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