Electoral District (Canada) - Political Issues

Political Issues

Because electoral district boundaries are proposed by an arms-length body, rather than directly by political parties themselves, gerrymandering is not generally seen as a major issue in Canada. However, in 2006 the provincial government of Prince Edward Island was accused of gerrymandering after it rejected the independent boundary commission's report and instead proposed a new map which would have seen the cities of Charlottetown and Summerside each gain one additional seat, with two fewer seats allocated to rural areas of the province. The alternate map gave every incumbent member of the governing party a "safe" seat to run in, while the original report would have forced some of the party's MLAs to compete against each other in nomination contests.

The unequal size of electoral districts across Canada has sometimes given rise to discussion of whether all Canadians enjoy equal democratic representation by population. For example, the four electoral districts in Prince Edward Island have an average size of just 33,963 voters each, while electoral districts in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia have an average size of over 125,000 voters each — only slightly smaller, in fact, than the entire population of Prince Edward Island — and the four Atlantic Provinces combined have a total of 32 seats, more than Alberta even though this province has a significantly larger population than the total population of the Atlantic provinces.

Conversely, pure representation by population creates distinct disadvantages for some Canadians, giving rise to frequent debate about how to balance the population size of electoral districts against their geographic size. Whereas urban districts, such as Toronto Centre, Vancouver Quadra or Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, may be as small as 50 km2 or less, more rural districts, such as Timmins—James Bay, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou or Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River may encompass tens or hundreds of thousands of square kilometres in size. Thus, while Canadians who reside in major urban centres typically live within walking distance of their federal or provincial representatives' constituency offices, a rural politician who represents dozens of geographically dispersed small towns must normally incur much greater travel expenses, being forced to drive for several hours, or even to travel by air, in order to visit parts of their own district — and may even need to maintain more than one constituency office in order to properly represent all of their constituents. In Ontario, for example, the highest annual expense budgets among members of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario are consistently filed by the representatives for the province's two largest and northernmost electoral districts; both must spend far more on travel to and from Toronto, travel within their own ridings and additional support staff in multiple communities within their ridings than any other legislator in the province.