Prelude to Redistribution

The province of BC is, at this time, going through a process of electoral seat redistribution. However, this particular redistribution is quite interesting because of the addition of two factors: 1)Because of distribution of population, there will be more seats in the Lower Mainland and Victoria than the rest of the province; and 2) A map showing possible STV seats will be created.

So first, I'll give you a quick overview on how much population a BC electoral district can have. The population of the province is divided by the number of seats in the province. There can be a deviation of + or - 25%. In a few "special circumstances", a electoral district does not have meet those numbers, but be pretty close to doing so. As well, there can be 6 seats added to the legislature this time around.

So yesterday, there was a Electoral Boundaries Commission meeting attended by a few people; most notably a city councillor, former BC NDP candidates, a former Socred MLA, and myself. There were two major concerns given out at that meeting:

1. That Northern Electoral Districts were massive in land area, hard to travel in, and hard to communicate in, so the land area of such districts should be as small as possible.
2. That the Lower Mainland should not be given more seats as that would reduce the already faint voice of Northerners in the Legislature. At the same time, seats in the North should be kept the same or increased.

My submission to the Commission was basically this: keep Northern Electoral Districts as geographically as small as possible and have boundaries follow landmarks so that it is easy for people to know which district they are in. As well, the Commission should add 6 more seats to the Legislature in order to keep our districts geographically small. Of course, those seats would go to the Lower Mainland, but, such is reality. To try to preserve what little power us Northerners have, I also suggested having the population of Northern districts as small as possible and Lower Mainland districts as large as possible. For the STV seats, I suggested that same sort of thing: keep the STV district geographically small, even at the cost of proportionality.

But at the end, my friends and I realized that the core problem is that Northerners are not going to have the voice that we require. Maybe, we thought, a reintroduction of bicameralism with the second house representing regions would help do this. Or possibly Northern BC separating for the South.