Canada Federal Representation 2024

[Oryxslayer]

Territories getting a seat of their own makes sense, but the malapportionment within provinces is bad enough on its own, let alone the various oddities between different provinces.

I mean I would argue that malapportionment within a province to give First nation groups a voice - as is done in some parts of northern Ontario - is just a different version of a VRA seat built for a nation without OMOV. Beyond that though it gets indefensible.

[Oryxslayer]

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.

Also looking at the map, why keep SJ East but not South? This effectively says "were keeping the seats named after the city, but not really," making it seem like there only is one side of the city.

[Oryxslayer]

The Nova Scotia Commission has released its final report.

https://redecoupage-redistribution-2022.ca/com/ns/rprt/index_e.aspx


Here is the map:  https://redecoupage-redistribution-2022.ca/ebv/en/?locale=en-ca&prov=ns


The four Halifax-area seats range in population from +12% to +19% above the provincial quota.

The other four seats range from -15% to +8%.

There is a new 'post-industrial' seat in Cape Breton called Sydney--Glace Bay.

While the rural/built up split of Cape Breton arguable makes more sense as a seat then the current arrange - that surely has the effect of giving the region a partisan sorting. NDP might be competitive in the built up seat, Cons have to like the rural one.

[Oryxslayer]

New Brunswick is now out https://redecoupage-redistribution-2022.ca/com/nb/rprt/nb-fin_e.pdf

St. John remains cracked in 2.

[Oryxslayer]

Anyone interested in Quebec provincial boundary proposals? Two seats reapportioned: Gaspé and Bourget are eliminated, one seat created in the center near Drummondville, the other taking in half of Saint Jerome and some neighboring suburbs.

[Oryxslayer]

PROV	PR	2021 Population	Seats	Quota	Gini	Rank	L-H	Rank
NL	10	510,550	7	72,936	0.1134	10	0.0906	10
PE	11	154,331	4	38,583	0.0077	1	0.0057	1
NS	12	969,383	11	88,126	0.0688	7	0.0596	9
NB	13	775,610	10	77,561	0.0724	9	0.0545	8
QC	24	8,501,833	78	108,998	0.0325	5	0.0238	5
ON	35	14,223,942	122	116,590	0.0458	6	0.0321	6
MB	46	1,342,153	14	95,868	0.0241	3	0.0176	4
SK	47	1,132,505	14	80,893	0.0699	8	0.0544	7
AB	48	4,262,635	37	115,206	0.0223	2	0.0154	2
BC	59	5,000,879	43	116,300	0.0243	4	0.0160	3

Provinces east of Ontario (QC, NB, NS, PE, NL): 10,911,707 people; 110 seats
Provinces west of Ontario (BC, AB, SK, MB): 11,738,172 people; 108 seats

How is that meant to be remotely fair?

Canada has laws in place to ensure 'fair' representation for people living in smaller provinces or hard to reach areas. You can think of doing to same work as the US electoral college, just so convoluted nobody defends or attacks it. Atlantic Canada should not have the seats it presently has under OMOV, but that isn't a thing here. Atlantic Canada's seats are grandfather-claused into the process through constant legislation that traces it's way back to confederation.

But that's no all. Inside the provinces, if a certain community ii is deemed to have special circumstances and could have a seat covering it way below OMOV for the provinces allocation. Most of the time, this comes into play in the far north of each province. Be it because of the lack of road connections, the extreme distances that would be required for representation, or the large number of first nation reservations. This is why seats like Kenora and Toronto Centre have huge separation in the number of electors.

And it probably will never change. Maybe some future PM will seek to increase every other provinces seat count so that Atlantic Canada is left with equivalent representation, but thats it. This is of course cause a Rotten Borough is only truly rotten if the incumbent party will never lose. And that is certainly not the case here, especially now given the swings in the region. If both parties benefit, nobody has a desire for change.

[Oryxslayer]

Why couldn't a special exception be allowed to create a northern Quebec seat that is primarily indigenous? Having a seat that is just Inuit and Cree (Nunavik and Eeyou Istchee) without extending into the Francophone Abitibi - Val-d'Or region seems like a perfectly reasonable seat to me, especially if the likes of Labrador, Kenora and the northern SK seat can exist.

For being there, there is no common community of interest between the Cree and the Inuit. They are not even run by the same law (for some reason, the Inuit are living in Northern Villages established by the provincial law, not reservations, have a regional government, not bands and get their services from the provincial government, not the federal like the Cree). They actually don't get along well either.

True, but an argument could still be made for creating an Indigenous district. They're going to be in the same district whether Val-d'Or is included or not, so why not at least remove that part of it? It doesn't seem right to have the Bloc represent those areas.

There is such a district in the National Assembly of Quebec. Ungava covers all of Nord-du-Quebec and nothing more. It's undersized by about 2/3s compared to the rest of the province and everyone lives in small disconnected communities.

The main issue from my perspective I guess is a lack of Racially Polarized Voting (to borrow a VRA term) or RPV. Ungava in the past decade has just followed the provincial electoral mood, and before that it seemingly was a PQ-leaning seat. More recently we have had First Nations candidates standing for the liberals or QC, and they haven't won a lot more votes than their party in past contests. This history doesn't exactly suggest Ungava voters are behaving that differently from other Quebecois. Compare this to Saskatchewan, Manitoba, or even Northern Ontario where voter behavior radically shiftes when you go far enough North.

[Oryxslayer]

Why couldn't a special exception be allowed to create a northern Quebec seat that is primarily indigenous? Having a seat that is just Inuit and Cree (Nunavik and Eeyou Istchee) without extending into the Francophone Abitibi - Val-d'Or region seems like a perfectly reasonable seat to me, especially if the likes of Labrador, Kenora and the northern SK seat can exist.

For being there, there is no common community of interest between the Cree and the Inuit. They are not even run by the same law (for some reason, the Inuit are living in Northern Villages established by the provincial law, not reservations, have a regional government, not bands and get their services from the provincial government, not the federal like the Cree). They actually don't get along well either.

True, but an argument could still be made for creating an Indigenous district. They're going to be in the same district whether Val-d'Or is included or not, so why not at least remove that part of it? It doesn't seem right to have the Bloc represent those areas.

There is such a district in the National Assembly of Quebec. Ungava covers all of Nord-du-Quebec and nothing more. It's undersized by about 2/3s compared to the rest of the province and everyone lives in small disconnected communities.

The main issue from my perspective I guess is a lack of Racially Polarized Voting (to borrow a VRA term) or RPV. Ungava in the past decade has just followed the provincial electoral mood, and before that it seemingly was a PQ-leaning seat. More recently we have had First Nations candidates standing for the liberals or QC, and they haven't won a lot more votes than their party in past contests. This history doesn't exactly suggest Ungava voters are behaving that differently from other Quebecois. Compare this to Saskatchewan, Manitoba, or even Northern Ontario where voter behavior radically shiftes when you go far enough North.

The Cree definitively have racially polirized voting.

Vote in the northern villages (Inuit), 2021, polling day only:
Liberal 833 (36.4%)
NDP 674 (29.5%)
Conservative 220 (9.6%)
Bloc 141 (6.2%)
Marijuana 139 (6.1%)
Parti Libre 118 (5.2%)
PPC 115 (5.0%)
Green 47 (2.1%)

Vote in the Cree reservations, 2021, polling day only: 2281
NDP 1277 (56.0%)
Liberal 407 (17.8%)
Conservative 242 (10.6%)
Bloc 224 (9.8%)
PPC 59 (2.6%)
Grn 25 (1.1%)
Marijuana 24 (1.1%)
Parti Libre 23 (1.0%)

Well then we have our second answer: you would have to create a seat even smaller than Nord-du-Quebec, perhaps the smallest in the nation outside of Atlantic Canada, and the territories,  to get the First nations population up to a serious percentage of the vote. Removing Abitibi wouldn't be enough. Cause both groups can't elect candidates of choice in the Ungava seat as it is, despite the fracturing of vote seemingly being more prevalent there than elsewhere in Quebec. Downsizing the seat with no change in accessibility doesn't make sense, at least on the surface.

For example, Ungava has 45.5K population and 28.5K electors. But obviously turnout is lower than that given distance and population groups, historically below 50%.  Looking at the 2018 Quebec poll results, the places the CAQ and PQ won were all the clustered settlements along the borders with Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, and the other more settled areas to their south. So you would have to rip them out as well, leaving the seat with a population even below the new Saskatchewan access seat and more comparable to those grandfathered districts in PEI or the territories.

[Oryxslayer]

45K is on the small end for ridings for sure, but because the area is so large geographically, one could definitely make the argument that Nord-du-Quebec should be its own riding. The cases in SK, ON and Labrador could be cited in the process.

I think it might take Abitibi's population to shrink to the point where it wouldn't be so overpopulated if your removed Nord-du-Quebec though.

We should move to eliminate the Labrador and the Northwestern Ontario ridings, not use it as an example to provide even more small ridings.  I think we need to get rid of the provincial commissions and make it a federal commission for more consistency. The idea of "Communities of Interest" is overblown, and really should be removed from the criteria.  Do you know how different the communities within the Northwest Territories are? The Inuit, Dene and Metis, and the Whites in Yellowknife - all so different, but do just fine within one riding. If you don't have enough people, you can't go down to communities of interest.

I disagree strongly, the point of small ridings is to protect communities which have SIMILAR interests, not people who are all identical, but people who have SIMILAR concerns, you are right that people in the territories are quite different all over the province, but their day to day problems are similar, their motivations, their environment, their cultural origins are mostly similar, so why not put them in the same riding?

Now as for Labrador, it is a particular distinct community from the rest of NL, so why force upon it people from another region, which would utterly overwhelm any power this group would have, it's a lot like saying we should merge Alaska with some other state because it doesn't have enough people on its own to warrant a congressional district, yes it is a small group, but it is and has and will be a separate and meaningfully distinct part of that province, and the same is true for certain northern Ontario ridings, this very American "equal constituencies" thing is a great way to undermine minority interests.

I agree. If Canada isn't going to draw ugly districts in the name of accessibility like the US and the VRA, India and OBC, or Malaysia and the Chinese seats (though these were purposefully uber-packed well beyond what was necessary) then having undersized seats does makes sense. That or have a separate electoral list and districts, like in New Zealand.

The grandfather clause seats in the Atlantic provinces are fairly stupid,  but like I said above, they are not going to be changed soon or ever.

Additionally,  because Canada is a federal state, it's hard to justify or even allow for seats that cross provincial lines. The one way you could try to make the FPTP arrangement more equitable between seats is through the addition of secondary Floterial seats. But those are difficult to explain or implement.