On the other matter:

1) The possibility of illegal activity should be investigated.

2) If people chose to vote for a withdrawn New Democrat or for the Green rather than the Liberal, they have every right to do that whether you like it or not.

3) Whether Briony Penn got more votes or fewer votes than winners in other ridings is irrelevant. She got fewer votes than Gary Lunn, so she lost.

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Originally posted by Brian White:
Perhaps someone would like to tabulate winning and losing vote numbers from across Canada? Who lost with the highest numbers (top 10 across canada)?

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Originally posted by Malcolm:
Given the vast range in the number of electors in different ridings, it would be a pointless exercise.

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Originally posted by Malcolm:
Given the vast range in the number of electors in different ridings, it would be a pointless exercise.

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Originally posted by Brian White:

There should not be a "vast range" in the number of electors from riding to riding.

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Originally posted by Brian White:

There should not be a "vast range" in the number of electors from riding to riding.
There is a notion in Canada that country people are somehow more important than people who live in cities and they somehow deserve more representation. Try put that to a referendum! Pretty easy to sort it out!
Might be something for the ndp to use to get people riled up!
People SHOULD get riled up if it takes less votes to elect people in some ridings than in others.
Something is wrong. When taken to its most extreme in England it used to be called "rotten boroughs".
You will find that a hell of a lot of these almost rotten ridings in Canada elect conservatives. This is one reason that the cons need so few votes on average to get a seat.
I was pretty surprised that the big losers were all liberals! I thought it would be a mixed bag.
I am not sure why malcolm feels he has to defend the conservatives but whatever. Some people want to be pawns.

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Originally posted by scott:
I assume you mean PR. I agree that PR should be the focus but rep by pop is an important principle. The constitutional protection of seat numbers in certain provinces makes it harder to design a federal PR system. I think it could be dealt with by incresing the size of the house so the no one actually LOSES seats.

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Originally posted by Wilf Day:

But the real scandal is that 53.8% of the vote in Saskatchewan lets Conservative voters elect 13 MPs, 25.5% lets New Democrat voters elect no MPs, 14.9% lets Liberal voters elect one MP, and 5.5% lets Green Party voters elect no MP. Should be 7 Con, 4 NDP, 2 Lib, 1 Green.

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
But that is the way the seats are set up. There is not a single urban seat in the provinces largest city of Saskatoon. The city is divided in thirds and towns ranging for hundreds of kilometres outside the city are added to each third. I would really like someone to figure out the polls that are inside Saskatoon to see who the people in that city support. I suspect that a race for two urban seats in Saskatoon would give the NDP at least one seat. Strangely when this carving up of ridings in Saskatchewan under the liberals happened Goodale's seat was hardly affected.

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Originally posted by scott:
No. It would be the opposite. Strict rep by pop wold benefit the West...Adding a top up layer of proportionally allocated seats as I suggested above could satisfy rep by pop and maintain the current seats in the maritimes and Quebec.

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:

As for the large rural ridings I have mixed feelings. While a vote is worth a vote in principal there is also the principal that every Canadian deserves somewhat comparable service from their MP. When the ridings get way too huge geographically it is very hard for an MP to provide good constituency level service for the people who need help making sense of federal programs and how to access them.

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Originally posted by Brian White:

I am not sure why malcolm feels he has to defend the conservatives but whatever. Some people want to be pawns.

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I have never defended Conservatives, but whatever, Some people prefer to be liars.

The principle reason there are wide variances in riding populations has to do with the fact that constituencies are not permitted to cross provincial / territorial boundaries. Thus, Nunavut, for example, will always be miniscule in population compared to nearly any constituency in the South.

Similarly, the "Senate Floor" (meaning no province may have fewer MPs than Senators) means that PEI seats will always be quite small.

I can see how this disparity upsets you though - especially the way it has led to generations of domination by Northerners and Spudislanders. Their dreadful hegemony must be very oppressive to you poor folk on Vancouver Island, suffering under the depredation of the Muckluk's and the Gumboot's heel.

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Originally posted by Brian White:
We have phones and internet and cars, and social services. You do not need to swap spit with your political rep to be "served" by them.

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It is pure baloney that rural votes are worth more than urban votes.

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My vote should have the same power to elect someone whether I vote ndp, conservative, green or liberal. And it should have the same power to elect regardless of where I live in Canada, urban or rural, and ontario or alberta. Clearly it does not.

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Basically you are saying that if johnie has a big enough farm he can have his own personal MP.

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And like I said, that could be cleared up by a referendum. If the NDP were balzy enough to propose one, they would get more votes.

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[ 04 November 2008: Message edited by: remind ]

I also don't understand these crazy arguments that they needed to create these mixed urban/rural seats in Saskatchewan because otherwise some rural seats would be too big. There are plenty of ridings in the territories and northern Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, BC etc... that are wayyyy bigger than any of the purely rural seats in Sask. would ever be.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
I also don't understand these crazy arguments that they needed to create these mixed urban/rural seats in Saskatchewan because otherwise some rural seats would be too big.

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Originally posted by Brian White:
We have phones and internet and cars, and social services. You do not need to swap spit with your political rep to be "served" by them.

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Originally posted by remind:
It is pure baloney that urban votes are worth more than rural votes. Especially given the means for urbanites to be urbanites comes from the rural demographics. And that we have more voices in urban centres controlling things than we do rural!
[ 04 November 2008: Message edited by: remind ]

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
I kind of like the Australian system where they do a redistribution after every single election to make sure that each and every riding has exactly the same number of eligible voters - the only exception being that riding boundaries cannot cross state lines. Why not have pure rep by pop.
Next redistribution, the NDP in Sask. has got to get its act together and push for the creation of purely urban seats in Regina and Saskatoon and an end to the current gerrymandering.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
I kind of like the Australian system where they do a redistribution after every single election to make sure that each and every riding has exactly the same number of eligible voters - the only exception being that riding boundaries cannot cross state lines. Why not have pure rep by pop.

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I agree. We have that in BC, although it is only every 8 years and there are some wiggle room that allows some variation is size, but it has to be justified. I prefer that it would be closer to strictly rep by pop. Another overlooked factor is riding size. There should be a maximum riding size legislated so that the Electoral Boundaries Commission has the power to add seats to the legislature as the population increases so that the density of representation is not reduced.

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I also don't understand these crazy arguments that they needed to create these mixed urban/rural seats in Saskatchewan because otherwise some rural seats would be too big. There are plenty of ridings in the territories and northern Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, BC etc... that are wayyyy bigger than any of the purely rural seats in Sask. would ever be.

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Originally posted by Brian White:
This became such a big issue in ireland about 40 years ago that it had to go to referendum.
The people voted in favour of all votes having equal power. I do not believe Canadians would be any different if it was put to a vote.
It is a basic fairness thing, not an urban rural thing.
Having rural ridings where minute populations get an MP is inbuilt gerrymandering.

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Vancouver Centre had about 92,000 electors and the riding was 16 kms/2. Its population density was over 7,700 per kms/2.

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
You just don't seem to understand the distances involved. Ireland is under 85,000 square kilometres. Vancouver Island North is over 52,000 kms/2. VIN in 2006 had about 84,000 electors and the population density was 2.2 per square kilometre. It includes the Regional Districts of Comox Valley, Strathcona, Mount Waddington and the southern half of Central Coast excluding Calvert Island and Hunter Island. These regional districts include the towns of Campbell River, Comox, Courtenay, Port Alice, Port McNeill, Port Hardy, Alert Bay, Quadra Island, Denman Island and Hornby Island.

Vancouver Centre had about 92,000 electors and the riding was 16 kms/2. Its population density was over 7,700 per kms/2.

I doubt the people of Ireland would want to have a system where their MP lived at one end of the country and they lived at the other which is geographically similar to VIN.

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
I don't know what you are on about with PR. Of course I support either STV or MMPR. I am not sure what that has to do with the difference between dealing with people's concerns in a riding where they all live within 10 kilometres of each other and one where they live within hundreds of kilometres of each other. The distance is related to people's ability to access their representive.

If we go to a PEI size ridings of 30 to 35 thousand then we are going to have to build a far bigger chamber for our MP's. And splitting up VIN into two or three ridings is a good idea. Having three to four MP's from what is now Vancouver Centre would also be in line with PEI. It would require at least tripling the House of Commons.

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Originally posted by remind:

[Quoting me]No. It would be the opposite. Strict rep by pop would benefit the West...Adding a top up layer of proportionally allocated seats as I suggested above could satisfy rep by pop and maintain the current seats in the maritimes and Quebec.[/end quoting me]

I do not get how it could, when Central Canada has the most population. It means they would instantly get more seats than they already have.

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Something is not being understood, and it’s probably my fault for mixing them up in my OP. There are two different things being discussed here.

One is rep by pop – making all seats have close to the same population, which currently they do not.

The other is proportionality – ensuring that the makeup of the house reflects the votes cast for the various parties, which currently it does not.

The majority of the population of Canada is in the East. There is not much we can do about that. They have the most seats and will still have the most seats under a rep by pop formula. They have more seats than they deserve because of historic locks and demographic changes. What I said above is that by ADDING seats to the house the seat count in the West could be raised to correct this inequity while maintaining the existing guarantees (such as PEI is guaranteed 4 seats).

To address the second point: adding seats makes the transition to pro rep easier. One of the reasons that the MMP proposal for Ontario was such a hard sell was due to Ontario provincial ridings being so much larger than most provincial ridings. This constrained the design process and created a fear that there would be a loss of regional representation (which was low to begin with). The average Ontario provincial riding population is about 115000 while in BC is only about 40000. If the Ontario CA has recommended ADDING a layer of compensatory seats the proposal would have been an easier sell because there would have been no loss of regional representation. The same thing goes federally. Either you add a compensatory layer to achieve proportionality or you choose a system such as the STV which achieves proportionality by having multiple member ridings but maintains existing density of representation.

[ 09 November 2008: Message edited by: scott ]