The Representation Formulas, 1867-2022


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In all these workbooks, I have striven where possible or practical to limit manual dataentry to readily available official figures on the population of each province under the decennial census, the number of MPs per province under the previous electoral distribution, and the number of senators per province and then relied on a series of formulas embedded in the workbook to calculate all other rules of the representation formula. I also put each step in one column so that they remain readily apparent. While this makes the calculations very long length-wise in the sheet and requires scrolling to the right within the sheet, I considered this both more instructive and easier on myself to avoid writing nested functions in either Microsoft Office Excel or Libre Office Calc. I have also assigned light pastel colours to the rules under each iteration of the Representation Formula so that you can more easily keep track of how they relate to one another and where each rule begins and ends. (The colours themselves don’t mean anything; I just selected what I thought looked good).

However, the Second and Third Formulas (1946-1952, 1952-1974) contained a rule of redistributing the largest remainders which proved too difficult and impractical to render under a formula and automatic calculation, so I entered a “1” manually in those columns.