Canada Federal Representation 2024

[EastAnglianLefty]

It strikes me that it might be useful to think in terms of the population in the particular bits of Calgary, taking account of what Njall has said about where connections are and aren't good.

Calgary as a whole: 1306784 (11.31 quotas)
South of Fish Creek: 115238 (1.00)
North of Fish Creek and southwest of the Bow: 375841 (3.25 - 'group 1')
North of the Bow River and west of Deerfoot Trail: 415774 (3.60 - 'group 2')
East of the Bow and Deerfoot Trail: 399931 (3.46 - 'group 3')

So you can't get an integer number of ridings out of group 3, which means you either need to add other areas of Calgary or you need to add Airdrie. Assuming you're doing the former and you're ruling out crossing round the airport, that means either pairing with group 2 along the Trans-Canada Highway (so group 1 could stand alone for three large ridings) or you're pairing with group 1 across the Bow (presumably in the Ogden area) in which case groups 1 and 2 also need to be paired.

Krago's suggestion of putting group 3 with the bits of group 1 east of Macleod Trail gives you 457550, which is pretty much dead on for four ridings and you can then get 7 largeish ridings out of group 2 and the rest of group 1.

If on the other hand you're pairing along the Trans-Canada, then it looks like that naturally draws a riding which is made up of the eastern half of Confederation and the northern or western half of Forest Lawn. I defer to Njall on whether that works on a community level, but it certainly looks ugly on a map.

TLDR - yeah, crossing the river seems like a far superior option.

[EastAnglianLefty]

It strikes me that it might be useful to think in terms of the population in the particular bits of Calgary, taking account of what Njall has said about where connections are and aren't good.

Calgary as a whole: 1306784 (11.31 quotas)
South of Fish Creek: 115238 (1.00)
North of Fish Creek and southwest of the Bow: 375841 (3.25 - 'group 1')
North of the Bow River and west of Deerfoot Trail: 415774 (3.60 - 'group 2')
East of the Bow and Deerfoot Trail: 399931 (3.46 - 'group 3')

So you can't get an integer number of ridings out of group 3, which means you either need to add other areas of Calgary or you need to add Airdrie. Assuming you're doing the former and you're ruling out crossing round the airport, that means either pairing with group 2 along the Trans-Canada Highway (so group 1 could stand alone for three large ridings) or you're pairing with group 1 across the Bow (presumably in the Ogden area) in which case groups 1 and 2 also need to be paired.

Krago's suggestion of putting group 3 with the bits of group 1 east of Macleod Trail gives you 457550, which is pretty much dead on for four ridings and you can then get 7 largeish ridings out of group 2 and the rest of group 1.

If on the other hand you're pairing along the Trans-Canada, then it looks like that naturally draws a riding which is made up of the eastern half of Confederation and the northern or western half of Forest Lawn. I defer to Njall on whether that works on a community level, but it certainly looks ugly on a map.

TLDR - yeah, crossing the river seems like a far superior option.

After playing around in the riding builder a little bit, here's what I would likely consider to be the optimal way to modify the map based on that initial division of Calgary into four sections as you outlined above, in order to create new sections with more sensible quotas:

1. Move the part of group 3 south of 50 Avenue SE to group 1. In practice, this would allow you to create the Calgary McKenzie riding from your maps above, and would leave the communities of Douglasdale/Glen, Riverbend, and Ogden to be joined with communities on the west side of the river.

2. Move the following communities from group 2 to group 1: Bridgeland/Riverside, Renfrew, Crescent Heights, Rosedale, Sunnyside, Hillhurst, West Hillhurst, Hounsfield Heights/Briar Hill, St. Andrews Heights, Parkdale, Point McKay, University of Calgary, University Heights, University District, Montgomery, and Varsity. This allows you to take advantage of the numerous central river crossings as well as the crossing between Bowness and Montgomery.

3. Move the following communities from group 3 to group 2: Vista Heights and Mayland Heights, plus the McCall, North Airways, South Airways, and Mayland industrial areas. This move is the least ideal of all that I've listed, but it works because of the cross-Deerfoot connections offered by 16 Avenue NE, 32 Avenue NE, and McKnight Boulevard, as well as the fact that Vista Heights and Mayland Heights are cut off from other northeast communities by industrial areas, and so the residential communities on the west side of Deerfoot are actually closer to them. This crossing of Deerfoot south of McKnight can also be seen in the current boundaries of the provincial riding of Calgary-Klein.

After making those changes, you end up with the following groups, populations, and quotas:
Group 1: 588,900 (5.10)
Group 2: 356,935 (3.09)
Group 3: 245,711 (2.13)

I don't think step 3 is really needed - there's room for those communities to go with Forest Lawn by my reckoning. On the other hand, whilst the boundary between group 1 and group 2 you suggest sounds sensible, I think in practice you would probably need to keep Varsity in group 2 if you don't want the Ogden riding stretching west of Macleod Trail.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The problem with arguing for a different arrangement of seats is that you need to convince them twice - first that their arrangements are wrong, and secondarily that your individual seats are better than theirs. Whereas if you accept the arrangement, you only need to convince them once.

[EastAnglianLefty]

How about this for a tidy-up of Edmonton?




Manning 111044 - as proposed
Palisades 115142 - coherent northern seat
Central 112696 - probably throws Desjarlais and Boissonault together
Jasper Place 112586 - surely an improvement on Winterburn?
West 111634 - not mad on the river crossing, but the Commission seems to want to minimise population deviations and it was the only way to keep all the northern seats with 5000 of the average. If you're less bothered with that, there are easy adjustments you can make
Strathcona 113676 - very minor changes
Riverbend 112347 - very minor changes
Ellerslie 110903 - takes a small bite out of Mill Woods
Mill Woods 110871 - a little less disruptive

[EastAnglianLefty]

And this for a tidy-up of Calgary:




Country Hills 120432 - if you want to avoid crossing Deerfoot then that requires more changes than can reasonably be considered a tidy-up. So I limited this to trying to improve the southern boundary on both east and west sides and changing the name. Stays north of Airport Trail
McKnight 121352 - shifts north a bit. If you wish, can swap Rundle for Monterey Park
Forest Lawn 121840
Shepard 123717 - largest ridings in the city. With this arrangement, all the eastern ridings need to be overpopulated a little
Midnapore 115238 - aligns with Fish Creek
Heritage 116845 - north-western boundary becomes the reservoir
Centre 120219 - can you call a riding Centre when it borders the edge of the city?
Signal Hill 118852 - probably improved by not containing Valley Ridge
Confederation 119096 - but this is worsened. It goes with Bowness, but not the rest of the riding. Rather elongated
Crowchild 117478 - as proposed
Nose Hill 112215 - as proposed

I don't think this is better than a map that doesn't cross Deerfoot Trail, but it might be easier to convince a commission of this than to get them to do a total re-draw.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Looking at the rurals, the issue is definitely Beaumont. Restoring Sherwood Park-Fort Saskatchewan definitely makes sense, but the knock-on consequences pretty much always means Beaumont ends up somewhere odd. Like Njall I think Battle River is probably the least bad option, but it's still not exactly good.





Peace River-Westlock 115995 - I don't think it makes sense to have Peace River and Mackenzie County in one riding and Northern Lights County in another. To make room for it, I've cut out Birch Hills County and areas south of the Simonette River
Grand Prairie 114266 - adding in Grand Cache
Fort McMurray-Cold Lake 110519 - I still think this is an odd pairing, but it's the current one and I don't see the point in arguing over it
Lakeland 112235 - loses Fort Saskatchewan, regains Lloydminster
Sherwood Park-Fort Saskatchewan 117125 - compared to the present riding, it loses eastern Strathcona County
Sturgeon County-St. Albert 111152 - unifies Sturgeon County
Spruce Grove-Devon 112401 - I'd rather keep Devon with the bulk of Leduc County, but I don't think this is terrible
Yellowhead 118616 - Innisfail is a bit out of place here, but less than it is in the proposed Bow River
Leduc-Wetaskiwin-Lacombe 120018
Battle River-Beaumont 117424 - I did consider replacing Beaumont with Lacombe County, but Camrose is much connected to Beaumont than anywhere in the riding is to Lacombe
Red Deer 118018
Bow River-Olds 113215 - not sure the first part of the name is still appropriate, as it follows the valley of the Red Deer at least as much as that of the Bow
Banff-Cochrane 113019 - puts Banff back where it ought to be
Airdrie-Chestermere 118018 - pretty much as the commission has it
Foothills 114788 - doesn't need to add Vulcan, so it doesn't
Lethbridge 115705 - Commission got this basically right
Medicine Hat-Cardston-Warner 117739 - makes a bit more use of the Saskatchewan as a boundary

[EastAnglianLefty]

Alternatively, you can put Beaumont into Spruce Grove-Leduc, at the cost of removing Stony Plain. Which is not great, but does mean you've got a reasonably coherent seat based on Edmonton's southern and western outskirts.



Compared to the map I just posted, Battle River-Crowfoot gains Wetaskiwin, the central seat (Lacombe-Ponoka-Sylvan Lake?) gains western bits of Red Deer County and Yellowhead gains Stony Plain and most of Lac Ste. Anne County.

Probably not a good idea, but I thought I'd chuck it out there.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I don't understand why you'd decide that St John's South is the riding that needs renaming when St John's East is plainly not a riding mostly made up of eastern bits of St John's.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I had my fifteen minutes of fame at the Saskatchewan Virtual Hearing today.

Zach Jeffries, a Saskatoon city councillor who hasn't updated his website in two years gave a shout out to RidingBuilder and TalkElections.

Nice! Any more details? Do people like the new Saskatoon Centre riding?

A lot of the usual suspects (I was the insufferable know-it-all).  

I had sent a link (https://www.bit.ly/Canada343) to my map to the Commissioners, so they already knew what I was going to show them.  The only question I received was whether there were any 'rurban' seats in my proposal.  I gave a long answer that could be summed up as 'not really'.

There was a Saskatoon hippie that liked Saskatoon Centre and wanted to add the University.

There was an irrigation expert who wanted to put Moose Jaw in the same riding as the various irrgation projects in central Saskatchewan.  He also wanted to rename 'Lake Centre' as 'Irrigation Centre'.

There was a woman from the Weyburn Chamber of Commerce who complained about Souris--Moose Mountain including the Regina suburbs.  She had just been hired three days earlier and read from a prepared statement.

There was a Ned Flanders-lookalike from Rosthern (home of the Rosthern Penis) who wanted the towns surrounding Saskatoon to be included in rurban ridings with neighbourhoods within the city, the way God intended.

There was Zach Jeffries, the city councillor from Saskatoon Ward 10.  He wanted to create a donut riding around the city, and included the newest subdivisions on the outer edge of Saskatoon for population balance.  He also disagreed with crossing the South Saskatchewan River, so who knows how he was going to divide the 'old' part of the city.

There was some cranky dude from Meadow Lake who claimed the Commissioners were handpicked by Justin Trudeau, and he probably wrote their initial proposal for DMCR.

And finally there was some other guy who had a 'very short presentation' and talked about himself for ten minutes.  I have no idea what he wanted.

What's the logic for your arrangements around Regina? It looks me like Regina and Qu'Appelle still work fairly well for three ridings, so why did you choose to swap the latter out for Moose Jaw?

[EastAnglianLefty]

I'm not a fan of Newmarket-King - looking at a map, it seems like King City has decent enough connections to Vaughan and Aurora, but no real links to Newmarket.

[EastAnglianLefty]

How's this for an arrangement in the York region?



Georgina--Stouffville - 107,567
Newmarket--East Gwilimbury - 112,749
Aurora--Oak Ridges - 116,652
Vaughan--King - 113,325
Vaughan--Woodbridge - 115,957
Thornhill--Concord - 121,154
Richmond Hill - 117,261
Markham--Thornhill - 120,204
Markham East - 123,377
Markham--Unionville - 125,088

Reasonably wide variation in electorates, but it's all within 10% and the northern parts of York are growing at a rate of knots so it should work out.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Georgina--King is very much a leftovers riding, but it does mean you can keep Thornhill together.

Ultimately it comes down to where you think King should go. On a map putting it with Vaughan makes sense, but as Hatman points out you can't do that without bisecting Thornhill. Your first attempt made sense numerically, but then you have the issue of the weak ties between Newmarket and King City. This second attempt is coherent in that Georgina--King is made up of the less urbanised bits of the region, but not coherent in that it has no central point.

The remaining option that hasn't been tried in this threat is putting Aurora and King together with as much of Oak Ridges as there is room for, then putting the remainder of Richmond Hill with Markham less its parts of Thornhill. A quick play around suggests you could probably do that bisecting Richmond Hill east-west along the line of Bayview Avenue, but I have no idea if that would be even vaguely acceptable on the ground.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Richmond Centre-Marpole seems totally unnecessary, when you could add Queensborough to a Richmond riding (as already happens provincially) and shuffle the Burnaby and Vancouver ridings round accordingly, for a much cleaner and less disruptive map.