When Paul Sanborn started researching the upcoming federal election, he was dismayed to learn he had been moved into a new electoral riding to which he feels very little connection — and which he worries will fail to represent his views.
The Prince George, B.C. resident had previously been on the northern edge of Cariboo-Prince George, which extends roughly 300 kilometres south to just past the community of 100 Mile House.
But as part of a redistribution process, he had now been moved into the southwest corner of the Prince George-Peace River-Northern Rockies riding, which extends roughly 250 kilometers southeast to the Alberta border and more than 600 kilometers north up to the Yukon and Northwest Territories, passing through the communities of Dawson Creek, Fort St. John and Fort Nelson.
“Maybe I was just being a bit grumpy but, you know, it just seems odd that we [the city of Prince George] keep getting sliced and diced in a different way every few years,” he said, adding that he’d like to see the city turned into its own standalone riding.
Sanborn says while he feels there’s a natural connection between Prince George and the other communities in his old riding, particularly with the importance of the forest industry in the region, there’s very little tying him to voters in the province’s northeast, where many people work in oil and gas and have strong ties to Alberta.
“There’s a social and economic flavour to this area which sets it apart from northeastern B.C., so to me it doesn’t really make sense to put them in the same constituency,” he said. “I would like to see a more rational boundary.”
What Sanborn has come up against is what those responsible for creating electoral boundaries across the country call “the British Columbia challenge”: the process of trying to create ridings of roughly equal populations across a vast and varied geography.
And it opens up questions about whether the current electoral system goes far enough in ensuring accurate representations of voters’ desires.
One of the most obvious examples of this complaint in B.C.’s Interior and north can be seen by looking at the results of the 2015 federal election.
That year — like every other election year before it going back to 2004 — the Conservatives swept the majority of the region, including the cities of Kamloops and Prince George.
But a closer look at the poll-by-poll data shows the Liberal candidates were narrowly preferred by voters in each of those cities, while a stronger Conservative preference was recorded in outlying regions, allowing the party’s candidates to win.
Tracy Calogheros was the Liberal candidate for Cariboo-Prince George and says it’s frustrating to know she had connected with voters in the largest city in her region but was not able to represent them.
“You end up losing an urban centre voice in the north because it’s diluted out across such a large, rural area with very different issues,” she said.
And Trevor Bolin, a Conservative Party member in Fort St. John who did get to see his MP of choice go to Ottawa, feels the same way.
“I think it’s too large,” he said of the riding he shares with Sanborn, a 400-kilometre drive away.
“For one [candidate] to try and represent from up to the border of the territories down to Prince George … we’ve got vast differences between our communities that need our own representation.”
In Canada, the country is divided into 343 different ridings or electoral districts. Each of these ridings holds its own election, with residents casting their vote for a single person to represent them in Ottawa as their member of Parliament, or MP. The prime minister is generally the leader of whichever party has elected the most MPS, though that’s not always the case.
As a general principle, Canada aspires for every vote to count equally. In order for that to happen, every MP needs to represent roughly the same number of people.
So as the populations of some regions grow and others shrink, riding boundaries are redrawn every 10 years in an attempt to achieve population parity.
That work is undertaken by an independent, non-partisan commission in each individual province, with feedback from politicians and the public.
Stewart Prest, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia, says while the commissions try to adhere to the “one person, one vote” principle, they take other factors into consideration, as well.
“They are also considering how to keep together historically significant communities,” he said. “And trying to ensure the boundaries are in some sense a manageable geographic size … that’s no mean feat.”
During the most recent redistribution, B.C.’s commission identified two key issues, which it called “The British Columbia Challenge“: the province’s “uneven distribution of population” and its “varied and rugged physical geography.”
For geography, the commission mentioned mountain ranges, rivers and the ocean barriers which prevent certain regions from easily being combined into a single electoral district.
And for population, it pointed out that the vast majority of people in B.C. live in the southwest, concentrated around Vancouver and Victoria, while the north and Interior are far more sparse.
As an example, just three ridings — Skeena-Bulkley Valley and the two Prince George ridings — take up about 70 per cent of the province’s geography, a land mass larger than France or Germany. At the same time, these ridings are home to just over 323,000 people, or less than six per cent of the province’s total population.
With similar issues elsewhere in the Interior, and faced with a goal of making ridings of roughly equal population, the commission has opted to break up the three biggest cities in the region — Prince George, Kamloops and Kelowna — and place different neighbourhoods in different electoral districts.
And while those cities generally show the same voting preferences as other communities in the region, the question of representation does come up when — as in 2015 — they vote in a different direction.
Prest said that unlike some countries where electoral boundaries are drawn up by parties seeking to give themselves a political advantage, the Canadian system has remained neutral, with the guiding light being “one voice, one vote.”
And he said while it may feel unfair for voters in Kamloops or Prince George to not have a single riding encompassing their needs, it’s a requirement under the current voting system.
“It’s always going to be this kind of balancing act, and not many people are going to be totally happy with the result,” he said.
While the voters CBC News spoke to for this story agreed generally with the principle of “one person, one vote,” they felt more room should be made for smaller ridings in areas that cover vast geographies.
But they also mentioned another possibility: some form of electoral reform which would result in each riding electing multiple MPs representing different parties.
That’s the solution preferred by Gisela Ruckert, a Kamloops resident and a volunteer with Fair Vote Canada, a national advocacy group that pushes for the current first-past-the-post voting system to be replaced with some form of proportional representation.
She said that while the feelings of alienation may be acute in northern and rural ridings, they are expressed all across the country.
“It happens in downtown Toronto, where people who vote for Conservatives have absolutely no representation,” she said.
First Past The Post vs. Proportional Referendum
“It happens in downtown Calgary, where people who are looking for an alternative to the Conservative Party end up with either zero or very little representation … and that’s because our political system is designed to give space to the largest voices at the expense of all others.”
While there are various forms of proportional representation, Ruckert said the key point is to have the outcome more closely reflect a diversity of views among voters.
Under the current system, each riding sends a single MP to Ottawa, no matter how narrowly they win. Proportional representation, though, directly ties the percentage of votes that each party receives to the number of representatives elected, often resulting in multiple members from different parties in each riding and guaranteeing that every vote impacts who is selected to govern.
Having an electoral map that more accurately reflects the diverse points of view across not just Canada but within individual ridings, Ruckert argues, would lead to higher satisfaction and more engaged voters and candidates, as it would make every riding more competitive, and the results would reflect the nuances in the final vote tally.
“We would have more colours on the map,” she said. “It wouldn’t be one solid swath of blue or red or orange or whatever it is at any given time.”
That sounds good to Sanborn back in Prince George.
“I’m not obsessive about electoral reform,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to make the electorate smarter or wiser or better behaved, but I think it would at least address goofy things like having the biggest city in the north sliced and diced.”
