Electors Per Electoral District (2008 Election)

The concept that people should be equally represented in Parliament regardless of where in the country they live ("representation by population") is somewhat more complicated to implement in Canada than it may first appear.

Elections Canada provides an interesting history of the development of the formula that is currently used to determine the allocation of seats in the House of Commons. Over the years, there have been considerations for territorial status, a "senatorial clause," constitutional amendments, "a 15 per cent clause," an "amalgam formula," and others.¹

Elections Canada concludes that "it is fair to say that even today the principle of representation by population remains at the root of the electoral system in Canada."² But as the map and tables show, the principle of equal representation rarely corresponds to the actual distribution of seats. There are fewer electors in Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Labrador, and Kenora combined (amounting to five seats in the House of Commons) than in the single riding of Oak Ridges-Markham in Southern Ontario, for example.

In general, Canada's Northerners are--numerically, at least--well represented in Ottawa.

Source: The Conference Board of Canada.

Methodology

An ArcGIS shape file of electoral district boundaries was obtained from the Government of Canada's GeoGratis ftp site.³ The polygons in this file were intersected with the provincial and territorial layer used in previous maps. The resulting features were merged by electoral district ID to create a single record for each riding.

The North-South boundary used to define Canada's North according to census divisions was imported into the GIS and overlaid on the electoral district polygons. The line was adjusted so as not to bisect electoral districts.

A map, Canada-the 40th Parliament, was downloaded in Adobe Acrobat format from the Elections Canada website.⁴ The values in the "Electoral District" and "Electors on the Lists" columns were cut and pasted into Microsoft Excel. The resulting table was joined to the shape file created above, using a one-to-one relationship for each of the 308 electoral districts in the country.

The ArcGIS map was then classified to show electoral districts in which the number of electors on the lists in 2008 was: (1) fewer than 50,000, (2) between 50,000 and 75,000, and (3) more than 75,000. Numbers were rounded to the nearest 1,000 electors, and districts in Canada's North falling into the high or low categories were labelled.

Excel's SORT function was used to prepare the two tables that show federal electoral districts with the fewest and most electors.

About the Series

Here, the North is a bi-weekly series researched, written, and produced by The Conference Board of Canada's Centre for the North. The series is designed to illustrate similarities and differences--between Canada's North and South, and between Northern regions--in keeping with the Centre's mandate to provide policy-directed research to decision makers.

This issue of Here, the North was researched and written by Peter Wilson.

1  www.elections.ca/scripts/fedrep/federal_e/red/representation_e.htm
2  Ibid.
3  ftp.geogratis.gc.ca/electoral/2008
4  www.elections.ca/res/cir/maps/images/PARLIMAP_40_E.pdf