Canada Federal Representation 2024

[DC Al Fine]

Which areas are likely to gain/lose seats within provinces?

Some guesses (please feel free to correct these)

Alberta: Calgary, Edmonton each get 1. The stretch between Calgary and Edmonton gets the third seat?

BC: Surrey?

Ontario: York region should get another seat. Anywhere else going to take seats from rural Ontario?

NS: Halifax would be entitled to a 5th seat if population had to be strictly even. Likely won't happen though. It will probably go from 4 seats + little bits of Halifax County tacked onto rural seats, to four Halifax seats + a mixed Halifax/rural seat.

[DC Al Fine]

What's the likelihood of major changes to existing riding boundaries outside of Alberta or BC/ON who are getting new seats.

NS was mentioned where Halifax will likely see a rurban seat in the mix, meaning the other seats will mostly increase in size?

Just eyeballing it off county population estimates, only Cape Breton-Canso, Central Nova, and Sydney-Victoria need to add population. Those seats shrunk a lot, but the other rural seats are stable. Eastern NS will probably need to be changed, since the three seats that need to expand are all next to each other.

The counties northeast of Halifax have four ridings but only have the population for 3-3.5. If I were doing the map, I would turn the three undersized seats plus Cumberland-Colchester into three rural seats plus a rurban seat consisting of eastern Halifax County and southern Colchester County. You could probably do the rest of the map without too much change from the current one.

It's possible that the GTA could see a gain of more than 1 seat, while another area of Ontario with lower than average population growth could lose a seat.



It might be time to revisit the Representation Formula:

https://elections.ca/content.aspx?section=res&dir=cir/red/allo&document=index&lang=e

Right now Manitoba and Saskatchewan each have 14 ridings, however Manitoba has a population of 200K larger (more than 1 electoral quotient -121K) than Saskatchewan. Should Manitoba (showing  my Manitoba bias) receive one more riding than Saskatchewan ?

Probably not, but that sort of thing takes a lot of political capital to fix. Honestly, I don't know why the population quotient got bumped up to 121k. The easiest way to fix this would be to add seats at 110k a pop until MB/SK and Atlantic Canada were only slightly overrepresented.

If Nova Scotia (with 11 ridings) in the future were to overtake Saskatchewan (14 ridings) in population, the current formula will still give Nova Scotia 11 ridings (10 based on population and 1 based on the Grandfather clause)

If it makes you feel any better, there's no way that's going to happen

[DC Al Fine]

https://globalnews.ca/news/8289530/bloc-quebecois-quebec-parliament-seat-proposal/

Blanchet promises to release "fires of hell" over Quebec losing a seat in Parliament.

Why would Blanchet do this? If Quebec is shrinking or growing slowly, well, too bad.

SNP are doing similar over Scotland losing a handful of seats in the coming HoC review.

Standard for nationalists, in other words.

Also, it's very likely Blanchet will win this fight, so why not?

[DC Al Fine]

Census population results were released this morning, so now we can start guessing about riding changes.

[DC Al Fine]

Census population results were released this morning, so now we can start guessing about riding changes.

https://twitter.com/electionatlasCA/status/1491217010474242049?t=so-xsnZx29_yKmT...

And with that comes fun!

Oh, is that a Canadian version of DRA?

Yes. Developer posts on Atlas occasionally.

[DC Al Fine]

Census population results were released this morning, so now we can start guessing about riding changes.

https://twitter.com/electionatlasCA/status/1491217010474242049?t=so-xsnZx29_yKmT...

And with that comes fun!

Oh, is that a Canadian version of DRA?

Yes. Developer posts on Atlas occasionally.

Oh, excellent! I look forward to playing around with that.

By any chance, do you know if they have a version with 2011 census data as well? It would be greatly helpful for a project I have.

Hasn't been released yet. We'll have to see. What's the project?

[DC Al Fine]

So, do we know what the seats breakdown by Province would be, barring any changes to the formula?

My understanding is that the calculation of the of number of seats each province gets is based on July 2021 population estimates, while boundaries of the the districts is based on the 2021 census. The total seats by province (barring formula changes) remains the same ones that the Chief Electoral Officer published in October.

I.e.
BC and Ontario (+1 each)
Alberta (+3)
Quebec (-1)
Everyone else (nc)

[DC Al Fine]

As expected, my county would be entitled to almost exactly 5 seats (4.99!) if populations had to be more equal as in the States. Knowing  our boundary commissions, we will get four ridings plus a couple weird rurban seats.

Heck my seat isn't even continguous by road. That's not gerrymandering, just incompetence.

[DC Al Fine]

Heck my seat isn't even continguous by road. That's not gerrymandering, just incompetence.

Is Halifax West the non-contiguous one? How so?

Halifax would need to build a bridge to Sable Island.

Can we really count Sable Island? I'm pretty sure it has no permanent population.

It's Sackville-Preston-Chezzetcook



Eastern Passage is a blue collar village southeast of Dartmouth, which was tacked onto the riding, I suspect because it's blue collar like Sackville. In order to get to Eastern Passage, you have to drive through Dartmouth-Cole Harbour

[DC Al Fine]

What do you think of my proposed Sackville-Preston-Hammonds Plains?

The other Halifax ridings are overpopulated  but I like the basic concept.

[DC Al Fine]

All done.

Here is my new electoral map for Canada from coast to coast to coast.

https://bit.ly/Canada342


Please send me any errors, improvements or complaints.  Or even the occasional compliment.

Re: Nova Scotia

Cape Breton-Antigonish is under the 10% range by about 5k.
Halifax, Halifax West, and Dartmouth-Cole Harbour are all over the 10% range, by about 15k altogether and Sackville riding only has room for another 5k or so.

I would do something like:
Move 10k from Central Nova to Cape-Breton-Antigonish
Move 10k from Sackville... to Central Nova
Shuffle around the urban Halifax ridings such that Sackville picks up 15k and the other urban ridings are within the 10% threshold.

Otherwise it looks good. Communities of interest are kept intact more or less. You did better than our last commission did on that front haha

[DC Al Fine]

BTW, I've been beta testing the new riding builder (made by election-atlas/ca / the506) and made a 37 seat Ottawa and a 100 seat Toronto map for fun:

Can anyone play with the beta version?  The link above does not connect to a valid web page (even after I substitute a period for the slash before "ca").

Electionatlas.ca and the506 are names the developer goes by. The actual product should be released in the next couple weeks.

[DC Al Fine]

More fun: What if Northern Ontario was a province, or had a devolved legislature?

What's the pop/seat in that hypothetical legislature?

[DC Al Fine]

I had mentioned before that Halifax county is entitled to almost exactly five ridings. This won't happen due to rural bias and difficulties making rural political geography work without bleeding into Halifax. In any case, here is five riding Halifax:





Red: Halifax
Blue: Halifax West
Green: Dartmouth-Eastern Passage
Yellow: Hammonds Plains-St. Margaret's
Purple: Sackville-Eastern Shore

[DC Al Fine]

Nova Scotia maps just dropped! Interesting choices of names - any locals/Atlantic Canadians have any thoughts?

First impressions:

Very pleased they are dropping those stupid ______ Nova names.

Sydney-Victoria looks undersized.

I like that they dropped the rural bits off of Halifax.

Splitting Bedford in two is a no-no

My riding (Shubenacadie-Bedford Basin) looks like a leftovers riding, combining Sackville, half of Bedford, a third of Dartmouth and some random rural bits. It doesn't seem to serve any community of interest.

There is some speculation that the proposed new boundaries for the Halifax riding would make it notionally NDP. Population growth in Halifax means that riding boundaries have to move inwards and cede outlying areas

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

My back of the napkin math has the NDP taking it by < 100 votes. South Shore also probably flips Liberal. Shelburne County (the part that got moved) voted just as Tory as rural Alberta last time thanks to the Liberals mishandling the fisheries file.

[DC Al Fine]

I'm trying to imagine the pushback you'd get here if a district crossed Halifax Harbour. Crossing the bridge for a district is a huge no-no here.