My First Academic Books

Posted on 2026/05/11 by J.W.J. Bowden

I recently completed my first two books, twin scholarly monographs entitled Representation by Population in the House of Commons of Canada and Where to Draw the Line: Readjusting Federal Electoral Boundaries in Canada. The first covers the history and practice of the seven Representation Formulas from 1867 to 2022 which determine the number of MPs per province under each decennial census, the malapportionment of MPs per province, Parliament’s gerrymandering before the advent of the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, 1964 (EBRA), and the origins of EBRA in the two decades leading up to its enactment; the second covers the process and practice of Redistribution 2022 under EBRA, with supplemental comparisons to all previous redistributions under EBRA from the 1960s to the 2010s, and concludes on improving EBRA and preparing for the next redistribution in the 2030s.

I am very pleased to announce that they will both become part of the Understanding Canada Series in February 2027, published by University of Toronto Press and Irwin Law of Toronto as trade paperbacks and edited by Gregory Tardi of the Institute of Parliamentary and Political Law. The covers of both would look like the others in the Understanding Canada Series.

This overall project flows from the confluence of the practical experience that I gained during my tenure from November 2021 to March 2024 as a Senior Analyst in the Electoral Redistribution Directorate at Elections Canada and my academic interest in electoral systems and representation in the House of Commons.

The books build upon two of my earlier articles published in the Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law and the Canadian Parliamentary Review, as well as two earlier presentations in 2023. The first and larger article from 2023 formed the foundation of Representation by Population in the House of Commons, while the second article and the two earlier presentations grew into Where to Draw the Line: Readjusting Federal Electoral Boundaries in Canada.

I have designed this part of Parliamentum to serve as a digital complement to the the two books and a repository of the raw datatables that went into the text of the books and their appendices published by the University of Toronto Press. I have begun building those webpages under the heading “Books on Readjusting Electoral Boundaries”, which contains a sitemap and sub-pages on “Explaining the Statistics and Methodology of the Datatables and Graphs”, the seven Representation Formulas from 1867 to 2022, all the Representation Acts and federal electoral districts that Parliament created from 1872 to 1952, the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act and its amendments from 1964 to 2022, all at least all the preliminary reports that all the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commissions (FEBCs) created under EBRA from the 1960s to the 2020s. I will begin uploading the datatables later this year closer to the publication of the twin books.

I will also present on the Representation Formulas at the Canadian Political Science Association’s annual conference at the University of Ottawa on 2 June 2026.

We’ll see how all this goes. One of my friends recently described me as a “book man” in principle, given my penchant for writing articles too long; books — academic monographs — solve that problem. Some of the other projects which I have outlined could certainly become books if publishers would take them. When Greg Tardi originally commissioned me (I can no longer tell if the pun is intended or not) to write a book on readjusting electoral boundaries back in late 2023, the series on Understanding Canada appeared under Irwin Law, a company in Toronto that specialised in “law materials for professionals, students, and general audiences.” But the University of Toronto Press announced in July 2024 that it had purchased Irwin Law and therefore took on this series along with it, which means that getting my first monographs published by the University of Toronto Press comes down to good fortune more than anything. I finally completed and turned in my manuscript in early 2026, but the publisher judged it too long and asked that I split it into two complementary books instead — so, really, another quirk of fate made me burst onto the literary scene with two monographs instead of one.

I had given the original manuscript the title of what I now regard as the second of the twin books (Where to Draw the Line: Readjusting Federal Electoral Boundaries in Canada) but found that what originally served as Part I of the unitary manuscript could become Representation by Population in the House of Commons, while Parts II and III could stand as Where to Draw the Line. I also also wanted to give what I see as the first of the twin books another catchy title, something more like Muddling Through Malapportionment: Representation by Population in the House of Commons, but that was deemed too long. I have preserved that fetching heading in one of the chapters at least though. In my wildest fantasy, these twin books would join the canon of Canadian political science by the time that the next federal electoral redistribution begins in late 2031. On that, we shall also have to wait and see.

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About J.W.J. Bowden

My area of academic expertise lies in Canadian political institutions, especially the Crown, political executive, and conventions of Responsible Government; since 2011, I have made a valuable contribution to the scholarship by having been published and cited extensively. I’m also a contributing editor to the Dorchester Review and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law.
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