Rep by pop in House of Commons? It Ain't Never Gonna Be Fair

A “government source” tells The Globe's John Ibbitson that the promise made by the Conservatives in the last election campaign to give more seats in the House of Commons to some of the country's fastest growing areas in Ontario, B.C. and Alberta is in danger of being implemented in time for the 2015 election. The government would not provide any confirmation or denial of this. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, asked to comment in Peterborough, Ont. today, also wouldn't get into timing details but simply repeated his party's platform commitments.

Here's the platform promise:

FAIR REPRESENTATION IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

The Fathers of Confederation agreed that the allocation of seats in the House of Commons should reflect each province's share of the population. “Representation by population” has remained a fundamental principle of our democracy ever since.

To ensure this principle is maintained and to take into account population changes across the country, from time to time the formula for allocating seats has been updated. Updates to the formula have been designed to ensure fairness for both faster- and slower growing provinces.

Because of significant population changes since the last update, the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario are now significantly underrepresented.

We will reintroduce legislation to restore fair representation in the House of Commons.

At the same time, we will protect the seat count of slower-growing provinces. We will ensure that Quebec’s seat count will not drop below its current 75 seats, and that the population of Quebec remains proportionately represented.

The focus in this debate has been preserving Quebec's 'clout' in the House of Commons. If they stick at 75 seats while other provinces get more seats, their “clout” is reduced.

But even without Quebec in the mix, it's still not going be anywhere near the “fundamental principle” of “representation by population”.

Consider: The riding with the most electors of any right now is Oak Ridges-Markham, represented right now by Conservative Paul Calandra. He represents 153,972 electors. In the House of Commons, Calandra's vote counts the same as, say, Conservative MP (and Revenue Minister) Gail Shea. But Shea's riding of Egmont in Prince Edward Island has just 27,197 electors. In fact, in the entire province of Prince Edward Island there are fewer than 110,000 electors spread among four ridings. So, clearly, one elector in Egmont is worth a whole lot more than one elector in Oak Ridges-Markham.

Let's take this exercise a little further.

The total number of electors in the 10 biggest ridings in the country adds up to 1,177,289. So those 1.17 million Canadians are represented by 10 MPs.

Now let's look at the other end of scale, the ridings with the fewest electors. Those same 1.17 million votes are spread over 27 ridings. In other words, one group of about 1 million Canadians gets three times as many votes in the House of Commons as another group of 1 million Canadians.

Where are those 27 small ridings? Lo and behold: None of them are in Quebec. It's the four PEI ridings, the three in the north (Nunavut, Western Arctic and Yukon), and a bunch in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

The Conservatives, like any government, can promise to tinker here and there with the numbers but there ain't any way we're ever going to see true representation by population in this country.

Of course, that's not an argument to reject the current attempts to rebalance the House of Commons but it might help contextualize the debate to note that the rep-by-pop argument is just not about Quebec vs Rest of Canada.

And now, of course, you'd probably like to see the list of the 10 biggest and 27 smallest. Here is the 10 biggest:

And here's the the 27 least-populous ridings in the country. Together, the number of electors in the following 27 roughly equals the 10 biggest.