Book on Readjusting Electoral Boundaries


I recently completed my first book, a scholarly monograph entitled Where to Draw the Line: Readjusting Federal Electoral Boundaries in Canada, which will appear under the auspices of the University of Toronto Press and Irwin Law of Toronto in late 2026. This project ultimately came from my tenure from November 2021 to March 2024 as a Senior Analyst in the Electoral Redistribution Directorate at Elections Canada.

Companion to the Book: A Complete Database of Federal Electoral Districts and the Representation Formulas, 1860s-2020s

The Scholarly Journey

Funnily enough, I first talked my way into that secondment in July 2021 when I correctly predicted that Quebec stood to lose one MP under the Quarterly Population Estimates for April 2021 and the Representation Formula of 2011. The Chief Electoral Officer published his calculation for the number of MPs per province under the Representation Formula and the operative Quarterly Population Estimates for 1 July 2021 (released in late September 2021) shortly before I began working on what Elections Canada calls Redistribution 2022. I first delved into the controversies surrounding the Representation Formula, which Parliament ultimately amended in June 2022 so that Quebec could keep its 78 MPs instead of losing 1, in this article written in 2022 and published in early 2023:

I later explored the specificities of Redistribution 2022 in a presentation before the Canadian Study of Parliament Group in April 2023 and another before Elections Canada’s Closing Conference on Redistribution 2022 in October 2023. I then adapted the first presentation into an article in a special issue of the Canadian Parliamentary Review in 2024.

I poured much effort and many hours of research into this book, including in tracking down all the proposals, preliminary reports, and final reports or representation orders of every iteration of the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commissions from the 1960s to the 2020s in the University of Ottawa’s law library and Elections Canada’s library, which, in turn, allowed me to create a complete set of datatables for all the calculations on the Loosemore-Hanby Index which appear in the book. Rather than including all these datatables as appendices in that book (which would, in any case, obscure the formulas in Excel), I have decided to upload them here on a new webpage on Parliamentum because these data should remain freely available to all researchers rather than buried in some inaccessible law library or hidden in some archive. In retrospect, I regret not having copied all the maps contained in the proposals and preliminary reports; I did not do so at the time in 2023-2024 because I’m not a geographer and found them and the long-form legal descriptions less interesting than simply the names and populations of all electoral districts. (The Library and Archives of Canada has also omitted most of the maps from the proposals which it uploaded online in the Canada Gazette as well). However, I have provided the citations for the proposals in the Canada Gazettes which Library and Archives has neglected to upload online and the hard copies of which I consulted at the University of Ottawa’s law library; from there, one could go and find the maps.