Re: federal electoral boundaries 2012.

• Author: Pasis, Harvey
• Position: Letters - Letter to the editor

Sir:

The federal electoral boundaries commissions for each of the ten Canadian provinces were established in 2012 with each commission consisting of three members. Each commission had to follow several rules including a population for each riding as close as reasonably possible to the electoral quota for each province, community of interest, community of identity, and historical patterns. The variance from the population equality rule was limited to plus or minus 25%, except in extraordinary circumstances.

The publication of the ten reports demonstrates that each commission developed its own provincial approach within the required rules. However, some unusual features did occur.

The Manitoba Report set a tolerance goal of plus or minus 5% from the provincial average rather than plus or minus 25%. The Ontario Report noted an inappropriate involvement of two members of Parliament in the redistribution process.

The Commission for Alberta introduced what appears to be a new term called the doughnut approach. This method can be used to deal with large populations outside municipalities. In this way a riding may be designed to take in several small communities surrounding a city.

The Commission for Prince Edward Island decided to make no changes to the electoral boundaries established in 2002 for its four ridings.

The Commission of Saskatchewan published both a majority report supported by a judge (chair) and a university professor (vice-chair) and a dissenting report by a third member (president of Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities). Their differences centred on the number of seats in Regina and Saskatoon and the growth in size of rural ridings.

All of the commissions were required to establish ridings based on effective representation as described by the Carter case and not follow closely equal population in each constituency. A useful statistical method to determine the variation in the size of ridings is to calculate...