James Bowden's Blog

I presented an abridged history of malapportionment in the House of Commons at the Canadian Political Science Association’s annual conference on 2 June, which this year took place at the University of Ottawa. Ideally, one would like to go on at great length instead of only speaking for twelve minutes, but the necessities of brevity limited the presentation into a brief overview of the principle of representation by population, the true malapportionment of MPs per province each decade from the 1860s to the 2020s along the Loosemore-Hanby Index, the main features of each Representation Formula, and some basic methods through which Parliament could lower malapportionment in the 2030s. The discussant described my paper (a highly abridged version of the first five chapters of Representation by Population in the House of Commons) as reading more like a work of history rather than political science – which I readily admit and accept, either as criticism or as praise, given that I’ve never thought of myself as a conventional political scientist. Much to my pleasant surprise, my presentation on “Muddling through Malapportionment” generated some genuine interest during the questions and answers and even some praise from various other scholars after the panel.

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Since last I wrote on “The Last Gasp of Redistribution 2022: Changing the Names of Ridings” in early April, the House of Commons debated Bill C-25 (part II of which contains the Riding Name Change Act, 2026), at Second Reading, the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (PROC) examined the legislation clause by clause and made some additional changes to the names of the ridings established under the Representation Orders, 2023.  An Act to change the names of certain electoral districts, 2026  as adopted by the House of Commons in June 2026 would modify the names of 17 out of the 340 ridings established under the Representation Orders, 2023; 11 of the 17 ridings, or 65%, would grow in length, and only by an average of seven characters. While six out of the seven from Quebec would conform to the old pattern and grow appreciably, the names of all three of these ridings in Ontario would shrink. One of the three from Newfoundland and Labrador would also get shorter, as would the one from Saskatchewan.

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Introduction

Alberta’s Electoral Boundaries Commission Act contains key structural flaws that encouraged a judge to exercise poor judgement and gave Premier Smith an opening to exploit. First, in all other provinces and in Ottawa, an electoral boundaries commission consists of true independent experts – judges, chief electoral officers, senior civil servants, or academics – rather than overt political appointments. But Alberta bucked this trend through its Electoral Boundaries Commission Act and allows the Premier and the Leader of the Opposition each to nominate two members of the commission, which stacks it with political appointees and necessarily makes it less independent from the outset than its counterparts elsewhere in Canada.[1] Second, Alberta’s enabling legislation defines the function of the Commission as “to make proposals to the Legislative Assembly as to the area, boundaries and names of the electoral divisions of Alberta” – not to establish the definitive electoral map.[2] Third, the bad law expressly gives the politicians the power to reject the commission’s “proposals” and allows the Legislative Assembly to tamper with what the commission recommends and impose gerrymanders of its own. The Smith government has set out to do precisely that – yet all this chicanery hews to Alberta’s law, because Alberta’s law remains flawed by design. If Alberta had adopted legislation like Manitoba’s, then the final report endorsed by the majority of the members of the last electoral boundaries commission would already have become law and spared us all this upcoming gerrymander.

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