I finished editing the first proofs for my twin books in August and September, and the University of Toronto Press has now given them webpages as part of the Understanding Canada Series listing the names of the chapters in each. Better still on some level, the major retailers have bestowed upon me the title of “author”; Amazon now officially lists me as “James W.J. Bowden,” while Indigo merely lists me as “James Bowden” – but its Canadian seal of approval superimposed on the covers might compensate for striking out my splendidly pretentious double middle initials. Amazon remained more faithful to the books themselves than did Indigo in this regard.
Where to Draw the Line: Readjusting Federal Electoral Boundaries in Canada will come out on Tuesday, 26 January 2027, while Representation by Population in the House of Commons – which, despite the order of publication, I actually think of as the first of the two – will not join its twin until Tuesday, 9 February 2027. Seeing them under the banner of Irwin Law Publishing and the University of Toronto Press, as well as on pre-order in fine bookstores everywhere, now makes this all feels real to me in a way that it had not before.
Though only time will tell, I hope that Where to Draw the Line: Readjusting Federal Electoral Boundaries in Canada can serve as something of a sequel to John C. Courtney’s Commissioned Ridings: Designing Canada’s Electoral Districts, which came out in 2001 and therefore could only cover the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act up to the electoral readjustment of the 1990s. And I likewise envisioned Representation by Population in the House of Commons as a contemporary successor to the first few chapters of Norman Ward’s The Canadian House of Commons: Representation, which first appeared in 1950 and covered the history of the first two Representation Formulas.
Similar Posts:
