The absence of strictly defined concepts of has meant that demographic change has not automatically engendered electoral boundary readjustments. --R.K. Carty (2) In March 2002, Canada's Chief Electoral Officer, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, announced Canada's revised electoral distributions based on the recent decennial census. The resulting redistribution of seats in the House of Commons produced some odd results. While the census reported the slowest rate of national population growth in decades, the population of the province of British Columbia increased by over 19 percent since 1991--an increase of 625,677 citizens. Due to the vagaries of the current formula for distributing seats, Kingsley announced that B.C. would receive only two new Members of Parliament. Despite rapid population growth and despite the fact that British Columbia's ridings were already more heavily populated than the national average, two new MPs would have to fulfill the representational needs of six hundred thousand Canadians. This is the direct consequence of the historical ambivalence over what principles should guide federal electoral representation. Canada's system of in the House of Commons has traditionally been guided by two separate and contradictory principles, that of and the approach. Voter equality, also referred to as by population, one person-one or proportionate representation has been the dominant theory in allocating electoral districts in modern democracies, and has, until recently, been the dominant in Canada. The idea of the principle is relatively simple. If each adult citizen is to have the right to vote, then in the of equality those votes should be roughly equivalent in value. Thus in an electoral system of single member constituencies, those constituencies should have roughly similar populations to ensure that some citizens' votes are not more valuable than others. In Canada, the Constitution Act (1867) prescribed that the of voter equality should guide districting for the House of Commons. (3) The patriation of the Constitution in 1982 re-entrenched this principle, particularly via the Charter of Rights and Freedoms which seemed to guarantee equality in voting rights. (4) The dominance of this principle, according to Munro Eagles, stems from core Canadian notions of equality. (5) Canadians have always believed that their votes should all be of roughly equivalent value in elections. On the other hand, the to is a series of justifications for significant deviations from the of voter equality--all aimed at protecting against a loss of for regions in the country experiencing relative declines in population. (6) Parliament, and, more recently, the courts, have accepted the notion that some ridings should have smaller populations than others in order to maintain traditional levels of for smaller provinces, or for sparsely-populated, slow-growth rural areas. The pluralist approach to argues that this helps to prevent a rapid and unworkable expansion in the geographic size of large rural and northern ridings, and more problematically, that it allows for Boundary Commissions to respect traditional communities of interest or identity (whatever these may be) in the act of drawing boundaries. (7) Over the last two decades, Parliament has zealously defended the pluralist approach and its justifications for deviations from strict adherence to the equality principle. (8) Carty has suggested two major reasons for this. First, commitment to equality aside, Canadians have been willing to accept minor levels of malapportionment in deference to minimum levels of for smaller communities. In this environment, sitting MPs, who are inherently conservative about existing electoral boundaries, have willingly eschewed any slavish addiction to numbers, preferring instead to highlight other types of representational concerns (such as geography or traditional communities). …
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Jun 29, 2020
Jim Bickerton + 1
Open Access