Federal Electoral Districts Research Articles

Explaining immigration casework in federal Members of Parliament's district offices in Canada.

In Canada, a majority of federal constituency offices deal primarily with immigration files. The few qualitative studies on the subject show that the resources dedicated to these files and the type of work carried out on the immigration files handled vary between offices, thus contributing to disparities in service between federal electoral districts. How can such variation be explained? Based on the quantitative analysis of unpublished administrative data, this article first highlights the diversity of files handled by constituency offices, as well as the types of intervention carried out by constituency assistants. It then aims to explain the variations in case processing according to the type of case and the volume of requests handled. Studies of constituents' files received and processed at constituency office level have argued that the political ideology, gender and ethnicity of the deputy as well as the demographics of the constituency are explanatory factors. This analysis shows that in the case of immigration files, constituency demography is the most important factor, while the MP's political affiliation plays a very limited role. These results shed new light on the factors involved in the processing of immigration cases at constituency level, and add nuance to previous, mainly qualitative analyses. Our results also contribute to understanding the work of constituency offices for constituents, which appears to be far less partisan than in other countries where similar offices exist.

Canada's Federal Electoral Districts, 1867–2021: New Digital Boundary Files and a Comparative Investigation of District Compactness

AbstractWe introduce new data resources to enable spatial and nonspatial research on Canadian elections, electoral history and political geography. These include a comprehensive set of distinct identification codes for every federal electoral district in Canada from 1867 to the present, a complete set of digital boundary files for these electoral districts, historical census data aggregated to federal electoral districts, and tools to connect our district identification codes to federal election results. After describing the construction and content of these new resources, we provide an example of their use in a comparative-historical analysis of district compactness in Canada and the United States. We find that, in contrast to the United States, postwar institutional changes to district boundary-drawing processes had little effect on district compactness in Canada.

Policy Ideology and Local Ideological Representation in Canada

AbstractTo enable new research on local ideology and representation in Canada, we construct a latent measure of the policy ideology of 37,500 Canadian Election Study respondents using 56 policy-relevant questions and then use multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate the average ideological position of each of Canada's 338 federal electoral districts and 250 largest municipalities. We use these local ideology estimates to examine ideological representation in Canadian municipal politics. Combining our municipal ideology estimates with elite survey data from more than 900 Canadian municipal politicians, we find evidence of a strong relationship between mass and elite ideology. This relationship is consistent across differing municipal population sizes and institutional structures. We conclude with additional detail on our publicly available individual and aggregate measures and describe their potential uses for future research on ideology and representation in Canadian politics at all levels.

The role of compactness distribution on the development of regionalized waste management systems

This study develops and investigates new optimization metrics and the resulting compactness of waste management regions developed for Saskatchewan, Canada. Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation is used to develop waste management regions, and two new optimization metrics are proposed, accounting for the percent spread of landfills, populated places, and roads, as well as the sub-region areas. Federal electoral districts optimized efficiently, requiring only 3 iterations. The optimized percent standard deviation (SD) ranged between 2.64 and 3.17. Constituencies realized a larger reduction in percent SD, but took a maximum of 15 iterations. When accounting for the area of each sub-region constituencies appeared to optimize more efficiently. As a result, the average, median, and distribution of the isoperimetric quotient were used to further evaluate the resulting tessellations. The SD of the isoperimetric quotient was reduced by 56.5% and 55.9% for federal electoral districts and constituencies, respectively. This reduction is similar for both input tessellations even though 7.3 times more iterations were required from optimization of constituencies. However, constituencies had, on average, a higher maximum compactness (0.8344) compared to federal electoral districts (0.7640). The results suggest that the number of sub-regions and area are important factors in spatial optimization of waste management regions.

Distributive Politics in Canada: The Case of Infrastructure Spending in Rural and Suburban Districts

AbstractThis article examines the presence of geographically targeted spending in the allocation of infrastructure projects in Canada. Building on formal models of distributive politics, we expect government districts, core government districts and swing districts to be advantaged in terms of infrastructure projects. We also investigate whether characteristics of Members of Parliament (MPs), such as seniority or holding a cabinet position, influence the distribution of infrastructure projects. Empirically, we analyze the amount of funding allocated by Infrastructure Canada across non-urban federal electoral districts between 2006 and 2018. Our results indicate that non-urban governmental districts receive, on average, more money than opposition districts, and that this is even more the case for core government districts. In contrast, we found little evidence that cabinet ministers or senior MPs are able to attract more funding to their constituencies compared to other representatives.

The Distribution of Climate Change Public Opinion in Canada

Historic Canadian elections in 2015, both federally and provincially, created an opportunity for action on climate policy. While climate scientists have developed high resolution data sets on the distribution of Canadian climate risks, we still lack comparable data on the local distribution of public climate change opinions. This paper provides the first effort to estimate local climate and energy opinion variability outside the United States. Using a multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) approach, we estimate opinion in federal electoral districts and provinces. We demonstrate that a majority of the Canadian public consistently believes that climate change is happening. Belief in climate change's causes varies geographically, with more attributing it to human activity in urban as opposed to rural areas. Most prominently, we find majority support for carbon cap and trade policy in every province and district. By contrast, support for carbon taxation is more heterogeneous. Compared to the distribution of US climate opinions, Canadians believe climate change is happening at higher levels. This new opinion data set will support climate policy analysis and climate policy decision making at national, provincial and local levels.

Demographic Change and Representation by Population in the Canadian House of Commons

This paper considers Canadian representational debates, including a brief sketch of how electoral districts are defined across geography and population. Electoral boundary commissions in Canada have long differed in terms of the relative importance to be placed on population in decisions relating to the delineation of boundaries of federal electoral districts. As argued in this paper,the traditional understandings and agreements that have shaped decisions relating to electoral districts are increasingly at odds with Canada’s emerging demographic realities. In a nation that is highly reliant on immigration in maintaining its population, the current representational order arguably penalizes regions of the country which are growing most rapidly, and in particular, where new immigrants are most likely to locate. The current paper also considers possible reforms in the manner in which electoral districts are drawn, which at a minimum could involve the use of more up to date and accurate demographic data.

Constituency Homogeneity, Economic Risk and Support for Quebec Sovereignty: A Research Note

This article presents a test of the argument that vulnerability to economic dislocation, primarily as it is represented by economic homogeneity in communities, exercises a constraint on levels of support for Quebec nationalism. The guiding hypothesis is that residents of economically vulnerable ridings will be reluctant to accept the risks attached with political moves toward independence. The authors employ data on the level of support for the Bloc Québécois in the federal elections of 1993 and 1997, and the proportion voting "Yes" in the 1995 sovereignty referendum in Quebec, in the province's 75 federal electoral districts as their measures of support for sovereignty. Results suggest that there is a relationship between the geographies of potential economic vulnerability and the level of nationalist support, particularly evident in the 1995 referendum voting and the 1997 election. Calculations involving perceived economic vulnerability and risk remain as powerful defenders of the political status quo in Quebec.

The compactness of federal electoral districts in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s: an exploratory analysis

Introduction The decennial redrawing of federal electoral boundaries in Canada is a contentious and challenging exercise involving the delicate balancing of often contradictory representational goals. Primary among these have been community of interest and population equality, and the challenge of reconciling these principles has figured prominently in the litigation that has grown out of the process of adjusting electoral boundaries in Canada (Roach 1991, 1992; Knight 1999). However, other specifically geographic factors such as the compactness and contiguity of electoral districts, have also been included among the various desiderata of good electoral districts (Morrill 1981; Lijphart 1990; Butler and Cain 1992). In striking contrast to the American case, to date these geographic issues have attracted neither scholarly nor juridical attention in Canada. In this first systematic, countrywide assessment of the achievement of district compactness in recent federal electoral maps, we aim to redress the scholarly neglect of this issue. In addition, we contend that, in one form or another, such questions will likely come before the courts in future electoral boundaries litigation. The paper provides a baseline assessment of patterns in the compactness of the last two sets of Canadian federal electoral districts (FEDs) adopted after the 1981 and 1991 censuses (as defined in Representation Orders adopted by the House of Commons in 1987 and 1996, respectively). These maps were the first to be drawn following the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As a result, they are the first Canadian maps to have been scrutinized through the process of judicial review. Since the first judicial decisions with respect to electoral boundary practices were rendered in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we would expect that constitutional concerns would be more present in the minds of boundary commissioners in the 1990s. As such, a comparison of the two maps offers an exploratory assessment of the impact of the Charter on the shape of Canadian electoral districts. If the American experience (which we review briefly below) is any guide, we expect that efforts to balance equality of population with other representational goals should have the effect of diminishing the compactness of districts over time. Our analysis begins in the next section with a preliminary discussion of why compactness should matter in districting practice. We then consider the increased significance attached to questions of district shape in the US, and assess the prospects for similar developments arising in the Canadian context. Here we review several factors that incline us to believe that assessments of compactness may emerge in future rounds of boundary-related litigation that are virtually certain to follow the adoption of the new electoral maps. A third section discusses the conceptualization and measurement of compactness. This provides the basis for an empirical exploration of the compactness of the last two sets of Canada's FEDs that we present in the paper's fourth section. Here we document significant interprovincial differences in the compactness of FEDs that in the main seem attributable to the different landscapes of the provinces. With respect to our hypothesis about the decline of compactness scores over the two maps, however, we do not uncover strong support for this expectation, in that the mean scores on compactness for all districts generally or for urban districts in particular show little change. We close with some projections for the next map that will be forthcoming after the 2001 census figures become available. Why Should Compactness Matter? Discussions of redistricting virtually always include compactness as one of the criteria to be considered when evaluating electoral maps. Good electoral maps are those in which district boundaries define highly compact districts. Yet, as we outline below, assessing compactness is not a simple or straightforward process. …

Socioeconomic risk factors and population-based regional allocation of healthcare funds.

Using the notion of professional uncertainty a population-based proxy need measure for hospital services was developed. Its relationship with socioeconomic variables and Standardized Mortality Ratios (SMR) was investigated in an attempt to develop an adjustment factor for socioeconomic risk factors beyond age-sex adjustment to be used for a population-based healthcare funding formula for Alberta. The data used are 1990, 1991, 1992 vital statistics and hospital separation abstracts, 1991 census data and Refined Diagnosis Related Group (RDRG) case weights. Geographic units studied were the 26 federal electoral districts in Alberta using postal codes as a linkage geo-code between census and hospital utilization and death data. SMRs, age-sex standardized per capita hospital utilization and proxy need rates were derived and correlated with socioeconomic variables derived from the census files. It appears that the poor, the less educated and aboriginals need more hospital services than the affluent, employed and educated, confirming previous findings. The unemployed tend to need more but use fewer services while immigrants and non-white ethnics tend to need and use fewer services. The unemployed, less educated and non-white ethnics are associated with positive correlation with premature mortality (SMR based on deaths under age 75 years), while the employed, highly educated tend to live longer. In general SMRs have positive but very low correlations with utilization and need rates suggesting that SMRs should not be used for resource allocation. Stepwise multiple regression analyses showed that the percentages of unemployed, immigrants, non-whites, aboriginals and those with education less than grade 9 explain about 90% of the variation in age-sex standardized hospital utilization rates. Percentages of unemployed, non-white ethnics, residents with education less than grade 9 and aboriginals explained 71% of variations in age-sex standardized per capita proxy hospital service need measures. Based on the results of regression analyses, a SEAM (Socio-Economic Adjustment Multiplier) scale was developed for utilization (SEAM-U) and proxy needs (SEAM-N). In essence a SEAM is a set of relative value (RV) multipliers applicable to a provincial common per age-sex adjusted capita allocation value to account for the impact of socioeconomic risk factors on hospital service needs or utilization. Finally, the resulting regression equations derived from the 26 Federal electoral district data were applied to Alberta's health regions, regional SEAMs were derived, and the impact of such adjustment was assessed.

Eroding Representation-by-Population in the Canadian House of Commons: The Representation Act, 1985

AbstractThe Representation Act, 1985 amended both the Constitution Act, 1867 and the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act. This article shows that in each case the amendments erode the principle of representation by population by increasing the likelihood that federal electoral districts across the country will have widely varying populations. The first section examines the legislative history of the Representation Act, 1985 and its implementation in 1986 and 1987. The second analyzes the unsuccessful legal challenge brought against it by the City of Vancouver in Campbell et al. v. The Attorney General of Canada. The third addresses more explicitly John Courtney's main conclusions about the redistribution process in Canada as he expressed them in his 1988 CPSA presidential address.

Egotism in prestige ratings of sydney suburbs: Where i live is better than you think

Abstract Findings from the social psychological literature on egotism and in-group favouritism led to the hypothesis that residents of Sydney suburbs would overvalue the prestige of their own suburb as compared with ratings by non-residents, particularly in low-prestige suburbs. As part of an updating of the Congalton (1969) list of Sydney suburbs and their median social standing, 410 respondents selected from 26 Federal electoral districts each rated 160 of 480 suburbs on 1-to-7 Likert scales. In 12 of 30 local government areas (LGAs), residents rated suburbs in their “home” LGA significantly higher than non-residents did; this was also true when ratings were summed over all 30 LGAs. More importantly, 10 of these 12 LGAs were in the lower half of the rank order of mean LGA prestige. Discussion focusses on the conflict between the need to maintain self-esteem and group esteem in low-prestige suburbs and the images of these suburbs conveyed by the mass media.

Economic Policy and Electoral Self Interest: The Allocations of the Department of Regional Economic Expansion

This paper examines the relative importance of political and economic factors in the spatial distribution of industrial location subsidies offered by the Department of Regional Economic Expansion in federal electoral districts between 1969 and 1974. The conventional view would appear to be that allocative decisions are influenced by technical factors, by economic goals, or occasionally by broadly political objectives such as fostering national integration, but not by the electoral self-interest of the governing party. An alternative view, which is explored here, is that partisan electoral considerations may enter into the decision-making process in a number of ways, depending upon the government's electoral strategy. Using mutiple regression analysis it was found that after controlling for economic need, per capita expenditures on regional development incentives were associated positively with the degree of electoral volatility in an electoral district and with the presence of an incumbent Social Credit MP.