If Canadians think of electoral redistribution at all, they might hold this vague notion that Canada eliminated partisan gerrymandering by delegating the task from politicians to independent boundaries commissions. They might also recall having read or heard something in the news about state supreme courts in various American states ruling specific gerrymanders unconstitutional. But Canada possesses its own sordid history of gerrymandering, where the party in power manipulates the boundaries of electoral districts to maximize the votes of its own supporters and dilute the votes of its opponents, thus consolidating its gains in subsequent general elections and perpetuating its tenure in office.

Three Phases of Electoral Redistribution in Canada

Federal electoral redistributions must occur after each decennial census and flow from two sources: the Representation Formula in section 51(1) of the Constitution Act, 1867, which determines the number of MPs, and thus seats, per province based on population. The most recent decennial readjustment of Canada’s federal electoral districts began in October 2021 when the Chief Electoral Officer calculated the number of MPs for each of the ten provinces and will end in April 2024 when the Representation Orders describing the names, populations, and boundaries of the 340 electoral districts of the ten provinces enter into force.

For the first century after Confederation, the Parliament of Canada established – and often gerrymandered – electoral districts itself after each decennial census through a series of Representation Acts, the last substantive version of which appeared in 1952 and first applied to the election of 1953.^[1] These statutes both named and provided formal legal descriptions of the boundaries of each electoral district. This fundamentally political process produced rampant gerrymandering, where politicians choose their own voters and create electoral districts which favour one political party over others.

Sir John A. Macdonald in 1872 and 1882 and Sir John Thompson in 1893 tabled legislation which already contained the legal descriptions of the electoral boundaries, and they used their Conservative majorities to force their bills through the Commons and Senate without amendment.[2] In 1903, Sir Wilfrid Laurier opted against tabling a complete bill which gerrymandered the electoral map in advance and decided instead that a special committee of the House of Commons should thrash out the legal descriptions of the boundaries of electoral districts. However, a majority government holds a majority on all committees, so the party in power still ultimately prevailed under this system, which lasted until 1952. So Laurier’s innovation provided mostly illusory progress.

Two consecutive minority parliaments elected in 1962 and 1963 thwarted first Diefenbaker’s Conservatives and then Pearson’s Liberals of a majority on a representation committee of the House of Commons. The Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act of 1964 broke that impasse and has ever since sets out the rules and steps by which independent Federal Electoral Boundaries Commissions (FEBCs) establish electoral districts within each of the ten provinces.

John Hague Gerrymanders Ontario’s Ridings in 1882

• Senate Debates (1900-03-27) Gerrymander of 1882

I’ve been reading through the history on electoral redistribution and gerrymandering in Canada and stumbled upon a fascinating entry in Norman Ward’s The Canadian House of Commons: Representation. Ward quotes extensively from a newspaper column published in 1899 in which John Hague – whom we would today probably call a Conservative consultant and then more like a placeman or a party bagman– outlines precisely how he gerrymandered the electoral districts in Ontario in 1882. Ward’s footnote led me to the Senate of Canada’s Hansard of 27 March 1900, where Liberal Senator William Kerr of Ontario read Hague’s account complete and unabridged into the record.

Sir John A. Macdonald hired John Hague to draw up the electoral boundaries of the ridings in Ontario – then, as now, the most important province upon which parliamentary majorities hinge – so that the electoral map maximised the chances of securing Conservative majorities in subsequent general elections. Macdonald then tasked civil servants with translating those lines on a map into the textual legal descriptions that went into the Representation Act, 1882.

John Hague outlined precisely how he orchestrated the gerrymander of Ontario’s electoral districts after the decennial census of 1881. This grubby tale began on 15 September 1881 when Hague “met a member of the Senate who represented the government of Sir John A. Macdonald,”[3] as if this gentleman served as Macdonald’s consigliere in the Caledonian Mafia. The Hansard records that Sir Mackenzie Bowell remarked in feigned outrage that Hague “took good care not to write that letter until the gentleman who would have contradicted it had been dead two or three years.”[4] Based on Bowell’s cryptic remark and Hague’s description, Hague probably met with either Sir Alexander Campbell, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General and Senator for Ontario in 1881, or with Senator Sir David Lewis Macpherson, another Senator for Ontario who held the lucrative gig of Minister Without Portfolio in 1881.[5] Campbell died in 1892, while Macpherson passed away in 1896.

Macdonald’s Senator told Hague that the Department of the Interior had drawn up new potential electoral boundaries, but that Macdonald found the plans unsatisfactory. Macdonald had also appointed himself as Minister of the Interior in addition to his duties as prime minister, so he exercised direct control over the entire gerrymander.[6] The Senator described Hague’s assignment “as one demanding the greatest secrecy” and told Hague that “there must be no risk of the chart being seen by any outsider.” Hague therefore worked on the chart in his own house over the course of several weeks in late 1881.

Hague started by mapping the votes cast in the two previous general election in 1878 and 1874 onto the existing electoral map from 1872 and highlighting polls in which the Conservatives and Liberals had each won majorities. Hague then scaled up an 18×12-inch electoral map to 5½ by 4 feet and wrote the statistics for each riding on stubs of paper either pink or blue to show Liberal and Conservative victories, respectively. Hague then poured through the statistics from the general elections of 1878 and 1874 to find the total number of electors and the size of Liberal and Conservative majorities in each riding, presumably down the level of each individual poll within a riding so that he could determine how best to gerrymander the boundaries. He claims here that he “strongly opposed this plan as likely to prove cumbrous and very difficult to operate from in altering the boundaries, but was induced to put the plan to the test.” His map of Ontario’s ridings “looked like some fabulous animal, covered with loose scales, blue and pink, which fluttered like so many tiny wings.”

Hague then describes what Americans who study gerrymandering today call “cracking and packing”: the party in power cracks electoral districts showing strong support for another party and then packs these areas into adjacent districts in order to dilute the votes of their opponents. Hague called the same practice “hiving.”

“grouping of different sections of the district, so as to detach Conservative voters from places where they were in excess for the needs for a majority, and the attachment of such voters to districts where the new accession would turn the scale at an election in favour of a Conservative candidate where a Liberal one had hitherto been returned. Electoral districts which were hopelessly Liberal were, if possible, to be abolished, or the constituencies so arranged as to put the Liberal voters altogether in one district, especially where they could be drawn away from a district where they menaced the Conservative candidate.”

Hague re-adjusted the boundaries to concentrate these pockets of Conservative voters most efficiently so that they swamp Liberal voters. Curiously, however, Hague also stated that this gerrymander flowed “from two rules”:

“first, on the principle of equal representation to equal number of voters; second, on the principle that electoral districts should be arranged to serve the interests of the party in power when they are rearranged. These rules do not work well together, hence the highly eccentric shapes of some of the districts on the chart I have constructed.”

Today, the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act defines the electoral quota of each province as the average number of people per MP, thus the total population of the province divided by the number of MPs. Hague’s column might explain in part some of the huge divergences in the total population of electoral districts within a single province that I have so far observed from redistributions pre-EBRA: the gerrymanders of the 19^th century in particular relied on the number of electors (in other words, eligible voters) per MP rather than the number of people per MP. Under the restrictive franchise of the era, the population vastly outnumbered electors. In Ontario in 1882, only male British subjects who owned either urban property worth at least $200 or rural property worth at least $100 could vote; urban dwellers also needed to make at least $250 per year.[7]

After completing his map, Hague “was assigned to a room close to that of the Minister of the Interior” – which is to say, Prime Minister Macdonald. “Into that room, I was instructed to prohibit the entrance of anyone, even a cabinet minister, unless brought in by the senator.” Macdonald seems to have consulted his ministers one by one “on changes made in their districts.” Sir Mackenzie Bowell, then Minister of Customs and the MP for Belleville, Ontario, “made a little fuss over some feature, but it passed off.” Macdonald signed off on the map and remarked: “That takes a great load off my shoulders.” Hague concluded: “The Gerrymander Act, as it was called, was simply the chart I had constructed expressed in legal language.”

Hague’s gerrymander of Ontario in 1882 helped Macdonald’s Conservatives secure three consecutive majorities in the general elections of 1882, 1887, and 1891. Hague estimates that it helped the Conservatives gain four seats in 1882 and 1887. But Prime Minister Sir John Thompson’s subsequent gerrymander of 1893 could not save the Conservatives from suffering a crushing defeat in 1896.

Hague decided to make public this sordid affair in 1899, three years after Sir Wilfrid Laurier led his Liberals to the first of four consecutive parliamentary majorities, because the Laurier government had just tabled a bill to readjust the electoral districts in Ontario alone in advance of the general election expected for the fall of 1900. The Conservative majority in the Senate vetoed the bill, deeming it unconstitutional on the grounds that electoral redistributions could only occur after the decennial census and involve all provinces at the same time. The Laurier government tabled the legislation again in the next session (the 5^th and last of the 8^th Parliament) in 1900, and the Conservatives once again used their majority in the Senate to kill the bill.[8] Laurier had to wait until 1903 to undertake his first and only decennial redistribution.

Hague disclosed his gerrymander of Ontario’s ridings because Macdonald refused to compensate him for the $500 in costs that he incurred – the equivalent of over $20,000 today.[9] He seemed embittered that he “never received one cent remuneration for labour which took all [his] leisure for months,” and he advised his readers always “to insist upon a written agreement for a fixed sum, to be paid on completion of the work” when contracting with the Crown.

Conclusion

The politicians of the 19^th century, far wilier than any alive today (with the possible exception of Jean Chretien), practised what George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall dubbed “honest graft”, a sort of frank corruption, perverse in its openness and blatant in its transparency. To the victor went the spoils after each transfer of power between parties, prime ministers filled up vacancies in the civil service with their placemen, and the party in power gerrymandered electoral districts in an attempt to perpetuate its parliamentary majorities in subsequent general elections. However, honest graft met its limits with the squalid particulars of gerrymandering, which political parties treated as the equivalent of a state secret and which they entrusted to only the most loyal and able agents. The Conservative Senator who first met with Hague impressed upon him the importance of keeping the whole project secret. And Conservative Senator William John MacDonald of British Columbia even interjected after Liberal Senator Kerr read the newspaper article into Hansard, “Was he [John Hague] not rather a traitor?”[10] Neither MacDonald nor Bowell had the decency to deny the veracity of Hague’s charge, and Hague had even named Bowell directly. All this intrigue makes Hague’s detailed explanation so important and fascinating, and a rare find. I have not yet delved too deeply into this phase of the history of electoral redistribution and gerrymander in Canada, but I doubt that many other similar first-hand testimonies of this type exist.

Perhaps gerrymanders only held the incumbent government at the margins, given that Macdonald’s gerrymander of 1872 did not prevent the Conservatives from imploding over the Pacific Scandal in 1873, nor from losing the snap election in 1874. The Conservatives’ last gerrymander in 1893 also failed to keep them in power in 1896 and 1900. But I for one am glad nevertheless that electoral boundaries commissions have firmly taken hold in Canada since the 1960s and replaced the naked corruption and self-interest of politicians with the independence and judiciousness of electoral boundaries commissions which have to follow certain criteria and explain their reasoning out in the open.

John Hague also reminded me of Thomas Hofeller, a Republican consultant to whom the Republican majorities in various state legislatures outsourced the task of gerrymandering the electoral maps of state houses, state senates, and federal congressional districts in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. Upon his death in 2018, his estranged daughter Stephanie Hofeller inherited his estate, which included reams of data from his computers and drafts of his gerrymanders. She did not share her father’s political views and published his files as evidence of the infamous Republican gerrymandering of the 2010s in states like Wisconsin.[11] Where John Hague himself divulged the method of his dark arts, Thomas Hofeller took his to the grave.

Ward expressed some doubt as to the authenticity of John Hague’s claim, though I would argue that it is probably accurate if only because of the similarities between what John Hague described in the 19^th century and what American political parties still practise today in the 21^st. Only the sophistication of the technology has changed; the intent remains the same.

Similar Posts: 

• Electoral Redistribution
• British Columbia & Ontario Would Each Already Gain 1 MP (December 2023)
• Bowden, J.W.J. “The Ever-Expanding House of Commons and the Decennial Debate Over Representation by Population.” Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law 17, no. 1 (2023): 85-122.
• Readjusting Electoral Districts in Federations: Malapportionment vs Gerrymandering(August 2022)

Notes

[1] The Representation Act, 1952, 1 Elizabeth II, chapter 48.

[2] Norman Ward, The Canadian House of Commons: Representation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950), 27.

[3] John Hague, “Some Secret History,” Special Despatch to the Globe, 9 July 1899; The Debates of the Senate, 8^th Parliament, 5^th Session (27 March 1900), at pages 331-333.

[4] Senator Sir Mackenzie Bowell, “Some Secret History,” The Debates of the Senate, 8^th Parliament, 5^th Session (27 March 1900), at page 333.

[5] Privy Council Office, “Third Ministry,” in Guide to Ministries Since Confederation, 25 September 2023.

[6] Privy Council Office, “Third Ministry,” in Guide to Ministries Since Confederation, 25 September 2023.

[7] Elections Canada, “Table 2.1: Property or Income Qualifications,” A History of the  Vote in Canada, 3rd Edition (Ottawa: Chief Electoral Officer, 2021), at page 67.

[8] Ward, The Canadian House of Commons, 37-38.

[9] James Powell, “The Canadian Dollar Under the Gold Standard, 1854-1914,” A History of the Canadian Dollar (Ottawa: The Bank of Canada, December 2005), at page 33. According to Powell, the Canadian Dollar was valued on par with the US Dollar from 1854 to 1914. Since the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator only goes back to 1914, I used the CPI Inflation Calculator of the US Government to determine that $500 US in 1882 would be worth $15,524.14 US in 2024, which converts as of 2 January 2024 to $20,684.35 CDN. Hague had good reason to resent Macdonald!

This seemed the best method that I could use to take the gap in the Bank of Canada’s Inflation Calculator into account, and it depends upon the probably not unreasonable presumption that inflation in the United States and Canada roughly mirrored one another. The Canadian Dollar from 1854 to 1914 was also fixed at 4.86 Sterling; while I could have used this conversion and the Bank of England’s Inflation Calculator to find the inflation on £103 from 1881 to 2024, the inflation rate in the United Kingdom and Canada would probably have differed much more than between the United States and Canada and then yielded a less accurate conversion in 2024 Canadian Dollars. Indeed, £103 in 1881 comes to £10,322.67 in 2024, or only $17,447.47 CDN as of 2 January 2024.

[10] Senator William John Macdonald, “Some Secret History,” The Debates of the Senate, 8^th Parliament, 5^th Session (27 March 1900), at page 333.

[11] David Daley, “The Secret Files of the Master of Modern Republican Gerrymandering,” The New Yorker, 6 September 2019.