August 17, 2007

Electoral Boundaries Need a Second Draft

The Cohen Commission released its preliminary report on August 15th with a recommendation to increase the size of BC's Legislature to 81 and to change most of the riding boundaries. The Commission was given authority to recommend up to 6 additional MLAs, but it wasn't allowed to recommend a reduction in the overall size of the Legislature; the government should have given the boundaries commission that authority. BC currently has 79 MLAs but only 36 MPs.

You can't find anything that looks like NDP Leader Carole James' constituency of "Victoria-Beacon Hill" on the map for proposed electoral boundaries in Victoria's Capital Region, nor can you find anything like Harry Lali's constituency of "Yale Lillooet" on the new map for the Cariboo-Thompson; part of it would be swept into "Cariboo-Fraser" and part of it would go into the Okanagan region. Prince George would go from being the centre where three Liberal ridings with "Prince George" in the name share boundaries, to being entirely within the southwest corner of the new riding of "Fraser-Fort George". Changes like these, and dozens of lesser ones, drive the six-figure income set, incumbent MLAs, crazy worrying about their nomination and future election prospects. Voters want a fair system; incumbent MLAs want job security. Redistribution (changing riding boundaries) means that politicians of all political stripes have to start over in building new constituency associations and winning nominations in new ridings; some have much more work to do than others when riding by riding comparisons are made between the current and proposed constituencies.

The Commission's preliminary report makes interesting reading as it provides a review of boundary commissions since 1966 when the Angus Commission recommended that the number of MLAs remain at 52, but the Legislature overruled the Commission and increased the number to 55. As a result of court decisions, today's Legislature would be ill advised to tamper with a boundaries commission's recommendations. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1991 that provincial jurisdiction to draw boundaries is subject to Charter of Rights and Freedoms scrutiny. The court stressed that equal "effective representation" is required rather than strict numerical parity between ridings, and it said:

Chapter 4 of the Cohen Commission's preliminary report reviewed the legal authority for its recommendations, including a discussion of this and other court decisions. Legislative picking, choosing and altering recommendations, as was done with recommendations on MLA pay, would likely see the question of constituency boundaries before the courts once again.

Aware of the concept of "effective representation", the Cohen Commission's preliminary recommendations included eliminating three constituencies: in the North, in Cariboo-Thompson and in Columbia-Kootenay. It recommended adding five constituencies, one each in: Okanagan, Fraser Valley, Surrey, Vancouver and the Burnaby-Tri-Cities (splitting the current Burquitlam riding so each region has four seats).

Some political pundits, including Vancouver Province columnist Michael Smyth, have already started to light their hair on fire with outrage over the elimination of seats in the Interior to the benefit of new seats in the Lower Mainland. The tradition in BC is "one-mountain one-vote", i.e. allowing regional representation to trump representation by population. The truth is that the Cohen Commission has honoured that tradition. Under the proposed boundaries, a vote in the new (but similarly named) constituency of "North Coast" will be equal to 2.6 votes in the new constituency of "Richmond-Steveston". If no changes were made in boundaries for the 2009 election, a vote in the old "North Coast" would be equal to 3.1 votes in the old "Vancouver-Burrard". Both of those cases are the extremes; the Cohen Commission's proposals slightly reduce the range of the extremes (although population growth might test that in 2013). The real work of the Commission is in reducing the number of constituencies that currently violate the provision of no more than 25% variation from the average population to MLA ratio (provincial electoral quotient) which is 50,784.

In some regions, notwithstanding an additional constituency, the boundaries of current constituencies do not differ very much from the boundaries of proposed constituencies. The Commission's preliminary report includes maps of both the current and proposed constituencies by region. In Vancouver and Surrey it is easy to overlay the maps and see that most of the constituencies are subject to only minor variations (although those knowledgeable about voting results by polling station may argue that a shift of a block or two can determine the election result). In other regions, you can't find anything that resembles the current constituencies.

In the Capital Region, there are six MLAs now and there would be six under the Commission's proposals; however, the boundaries are substantially different. Table 29 on page 297 of the Commission's preliminary report shows that with the current boundaries Malahat-Juan de Fuca is 8.6% higher than the provincial electoral quotient; the others deviate by less than that (four less than 2.0%). Nevertheless, the Commission has proposed new constituencies with deviations of 13.4% for "Victoria-Oak Bay", 12.5% for "Victoria-Esquimalt", 11.4% for "Saanich West", 10.7% for "Juan de Fuca", 8.7% for "Saanich North and the Islands" and 2.2% for "Saanich East". It is easy to see why questions would be raised about why the proposed boundaries have greater variations from the provincial electoral quotient than current boundaries. During the upcoming public hearings, the Commission must explain why they proposed to increase "deviations from absolute voter parity" with no apparent reason. On the basis of its preliminary report, the Commission attempted to justify increasing deviations from voter parity so as to respect municipal boundaries, but that is a misreading of the authority to deviate by up to 25% from the provincial electoral quotient. "Community history" put voter parity ahead of respecting municipal boundaries. Let's hope the fact that five of the six current ridings are represented by the NDP isn't a factor contributing to this apparent affront to the 1991 Supreme Court of Canada decision.

The Commission has done good work in keeping the net increase in the number of MLAs to two and in recognizing the need, controversial as it is, to reduce representation in the Interior, but it has some tough questions to answer to justify some of its hard-to-understand boundary proposals.