National Post, June 3, 2011
By Lorne Gunter
Canada has one of the most unbalanced parliaments in the Western world. Adding a total of 30 new seats to the House of Commons for Ontario (18 more), B.C. (seven) and Alberta (five) will help redress the disparity, but won't end it entirely. To come closer still to the principle of one person, one vote, the new Tory majority government will also need to reverse a perversion in the seat-calculation formula inserted by the Mulroney government in 1985.
According to the Mowat Centre, a public policy think-tank at the University of Toronto, "the distortions in the Canadian House of Commons are far worse than in the legislatures of the United States, Australia, Germany or Switzerland. The reality today is that 61% of Canadians are underrepresented in the House of Commons." And all 61% live in the country's three richest provinces. In fact, according to Mowat Centre research, Alberta, B.C. and Ontario are so underrepresented that they are among the five worst represented states or provinces in the industrialized world.
Dividing the national population (about 34.5 million) by the number of seats in the Commons (308), yields an average of 112,000 residents per riding in Canada. The nearer a province comes to having 112,000 residents per riding, the nearer it is to being properly represented in Ottawa. The value of a single vote in such a province would be 1.0, exactly what each vote should be worth nationwide in an ideal world.
But only Quebec, with about 111,000 residents per riding, even comes close to the ideal. The value of each vote in Quebec is 1.01, according to the Mowat study.
The higher the value of the average vote in a province, the more overrepresented that province's voters are in Ottawa. Prince Edward Island, where each vote is worth 2.88, is the most overrepresented. Meanwhile, B.C., where each vote is worth just 0.9, is the most underrepresented.
Saskatchewan, where each vote is worth 1.39, is the second-most overrepresented. Ontario and Alberta - 0.91 and 0.92, respectively - are also nearly as underrepresented in Parliament as B.C.
We will never have perfectly even representation in the House of Commons. There are too many constitutional "floors" - guaranteed minimum seat totals - to permit all provinces to be equal. For instance, Quebec's share of the national population has fallen from about 27% to just over 22% in the past 60 years. Yet it is guaranteed to have 75 seats no matter how small a percentage of Canada's total population it makes up.
Similarly, the small Atlantic provinces benefit from a 1915 rule that ensures no province will have fewer Commons seats than it has Senate seats. So P.E.I. with four senators is guaranteed to have no fewer than four MPs, even though its population would warrant only one or two.
But these constitutional floors are small change compared with the primary cause of the current disparity in Ottawa - a 1985 law passed by the Mulroney Tories that distorts the way per-riding averages are calculated.
Instead of finding the proper number of voters per MP by taking the national population and dividing that by the current number of seats in the Commons, Ottawa divides the population by the number of seats in 1985. This makes the smaller provinces look less over represented than they are and has the practical effect of keeping the three "have" provinces from receiving the seats they deserve.
Unless and until the Mulroney amendment is repealed, fast-growing provinces will always be at a disadvantage, playing catch-up.
There will be those who claim the Tories are only going ahead with these added seats to solidify their hold on power. After all, their party is strongest in the provinces that will receive new seats. In the May 2 elections, the Tories won 48% of the vote from Ontario westward. Adding extra seats in areas their party is doing well in would seem to favour the Tories.
Except the new seats will hardly be in Tory-friendly territory: Most will be added in large cities and multi-ethnic ridings. The Tories showed last month that with plenty of hard work they can win urban ridings and ones with large, ethnic populations, too. But it's clear that they are adding seats for the good of our democratic equality, not their own electoral hopes.
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http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Making+parliament+fairer/4884967/story.html
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