New Brunswick proposes new federal riding boundaries

New Brunswick today became the second province to see what its proposed new federal riding boundaries might look like. (Newfoundland and Labrador was first off the mark last month).

The proposed changes in New Brunswick do not look, to my eyes, as radical a re-drawing as they do in Newfoundland though there’s a fascinating Twitter discussion happening as I write this around the #nbpoli hashtag.

Highlights:

• New Brunswick will still have 10 ridings but some riding names will be retired. They are: Tobique-Mactaquac, Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe, Beausejour, Fundy Royal.
• New ridings to come into existence include: Beausejour-Dieppe, Fundy-Quispamsis, Moncton-Riverview, and Tobique-Saint John River Valley.
• Ridings keeping their names: Fredericton, Acadie-Bathurst, Miramichi, Madawaska-Restigouche, Saint John, New Brunswick Southwest

Some initial thoughts on the re-drawing.

• Dieppe, a city of its own right next to Moncton shifts out of Moncton’s ambit — a riding held now by Conservative Robert Goguen and to Beausejour-Dieppe, the stomping grounds of Liberal Dominic Leblanc. In the current riding of Beausejour, Shediac would be the largest urban area in Leblanc’s riding. Now, I believe it would be Dieppe. That said: Dieppe — with more French-speaking neighbourhoods than largely English-speaking Moncton — has tended to vote Liberal.
• One of my Twitter followers, Andrew Holland, points out that the riding of Fredericton seems some big changes,too. The proposal is to confine the riding to the city proper and so the current largely rural areas of the riding of Fredericton — including villages of Minto and Chipman — are sliced off and moved to the new ridings of Tobique-Saint John River Valley and to Fundy-Quispamsis.

Still unclear — even for those who have a detailed poll-by-poll knowledge if this might help or hurt one party’s chances in the 2015 election.

Of course, these are all proposed riding changes. Now, the commission charged with drawing up the new boundaries will hold a series of public hearings on their proposals before making final recommendation.