Books on Readjusting Electoral Boundaries


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, and Parliament’s gerrymandering before the advent of the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, 1964 (EBRA); 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.

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.

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 here. I will begin uploading the datatables later this year closer to the publication of the twin books.

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