Electoral Reform in BC - Regional Districts and Provincial Electoral Districts, 9 for 7

(I'm referring all through here to the Electoral Map and the Regional District Map -- I'll try to make it obvious which I'm referring to, but opening up the maps is likely to make things clearer. Maybe colouring Regional District names differently from Electoral District names will help? Maybe I'll do that in the prose but not the lists of districts.)

So, by starting on the less-populated areas in the north of BC, I dealt with the easy stuff first. This was true in more ways than one actually, because before working on the three most populous areas of BC, the Thompson-North Okanagan, the Lower Mainland and the Capital, I thought I'd deal with the Kootenays. The mapping between regional districts and electoral districts remained pretty strong for the East Kootenay region: the southernmost, most populous area forms Kootenay East, but the remaining portion is grouped with the geographically similar parts of the Columbia-Shuswap regional district to form the Columbia River-Revelstoke electoral one.

No real quibbles there: There's a natural split between the mining corridor along the eastern approach to the Crowsnest Pass and the rest of the Rocky Mountain Trench country up to Golden and over to Revelstoke, so the composition of the Columbia-Shuswap regional district makes a lot of sense in the area of snow removal and other kinds of management -- but this regional district so big that it gets carved up still more. There's a bit of a land-swap between it and Central Kootenay regional district along the Kootenay West electoral district boundary: some of Central Kootenay regional district is included north in Columbia River-Revelstoke electoral district, while some of Columbia-Shuswap regional district is included in the other direction to make Kootenay West electoral district.

Logistics also push Trail into the Kootenay Boundary regional district while it's included (quite sensibly) in the Kootenay West electoral district.

I'm in danger of getting lost in the weeds here, I know, so I'll skip to the thorniest bits of this chunk, which relate to the most populous bits of the Columbia-Shuswap and Okanagan-Similkameen regional districts. The Shuswap lake area of Columbia-Shuswap regional district plus the northwest half of North Okanagan regional district form the Shuswap electoral district. And in the south, while combining all the less urban parts of the Kootenay Boundary and Okanagan-Similkameen regional districts into the Boundary-Similkameen electoral district, urban Penticton, the administrative town for the Okanagan-Similkameen regional district is carved off with additions from elsewhere) into its own Penticton electoral district.

So, one of the mis-givings I had about my scheme -- that it might be messy in parts of the province where there is lots of empty land with a sharp concentration of population in one place -- is borne out. Even in the areas around Metro Vancouver this holds true as electoral districts on the northern edge take in swathes of nearly-unpopulated areas, just so as, you'd think, to put them somewhere.

The statistical over-representation I noticed in the first tranche of Regional and Electoral Districts still holds, mostly, but not in Penticton and Cowichan Valley which are included here. Also, as I was adding these seven regional districts to "what I'd looked at":

North Okanagan, Columbia-Shuswap, Central Kootenay, East Kootenay, Kootenay Boundary, Okanagan-Similkameen, and Cowichan Valley

represented by nine MLAs from the Electoral Districts:

Vernon-Monashee, Shuswap, Columbia River-Revelstoke, Kootenay West, Nelson-Creston, Kootenay East, Boundary-Similkameen, Penticton, and Cowichan Valley

I realized that I had missed a detail around the Mid Island-Pacific Rim electoral district in the first group. The western (most remote) part of Cowichan Valley regional district is included (again, very appropriately) in the much larger Mid Island-Pacific Rim electoral district. So, the over-all average 

Regionalized Proportionality wouldn't affect this part yet, but let me untangle the rest of the map.

Electoral Reform in BC - Regional Districts and Provincial Electoral Districts, 17 for 16

After the last article, I've been looking more closely at the ways in which BC's Regional Districts and Provincial Electoral Districts relate to one another. BC has made significant use of Google Maps in publishing a map of the regional districts and another one of the electoral districts. This, together with the facts about BC from Wikipedia and the (sortable! detailed!) list of regional districts also there have been my main sources.

​I have started here, because my Regionalized Proportionality idea rests on clumping electoral districts from a single regional district together. In a widely distributed province like BC (or even more, in a country like Canada), straight proportional representation is not a good fit since the urban clumps that would swamp the rural areas around them in pure proportional representation could swamp or be swamped by other, distant urban areas with very different needs and political priorities.

Right away, I was pulled up short because the edges of the urban ridings in Greater Vancouver overlap the boundaries of what used to be called the "Greater Vancouver Regional District" but now seems to be called "Metro Vancouver", so I decided to work my way around the map to get to it.

To summarize the over-all electoral/regional data in BC...

Population	4,400,056
Number of regional districts	29		Population per Regional District (100s)	151,700
Number of Electoral Districts	85		Population per Electoral District	51,800

I've gone through the 16 northernmost Regional Districts and mapped out their relationship to their local Electoral Districts. In summary, the 663,575 people living in these 16 Regional Districts:

Alberni-Clayoquot, Bulkley-Nechako, Cariboo, Central Coast, Comox Valley, Fraser-Fort George, Kitimat-Stikine, Mount Waddington, Nanaimo, Northern Rockies, Peace River, Powell River, Skeena-Queen Charlotte, Stikine Region, Strathcona, and Sunshine Coast

are represented by 17 MLAs from the Electoral Districts (a near 1:1 correspondence that I was surprised by):

Cariboo-Chilcotin, Cariboo North, Courtenay-Comox, Mid Island-Pacific Rim, Nanaimo, Nanaimo-Cowichan, Nechako Lakes, North Coast, North Island, Parksville-Qualicum, Peace River North, Peace River South, Powell River-Sunshine Coast, Prince George-Mackenzie, Prince George-Valemount, Skeena, and Stikine

These districts are (statistically) over-represented slightly, at 39,900 people per MLA, leaving 68 MLAs to represent the remaining 3,736,481 in the other 12 Regional Districts, at about 55,000 per MLA. I believe it possible that the way Fraser-Fort George is divided, with about half of Prince George placed in each of Prince George-Mackenzie and Prince George-Valemount disadvantages the rural voters of the rest of the Regional District but so far, it has seemed to be a reasonable solution and I commend the folks at Elections BC (a non-partisan office of the BC Legislature, responsible through the Speaker to the Lieutenant-Governor, embodying the Crown) for doing their jobs as well as this: we don't seem to have a problem with gerrymandering so far.

Electoral Reform in BC

It wouldn't take a referendum. It doesn't need a lot of study. The result wouldn't be complicated but would reflect the will of the BC voter far better than the hate-filled mud-slinging we've seen since I became a voter. Elections that result in four year majority mandates from 45% or less (usually lots less) of an ever-dwindling turnout.

I've plugged this idea as much as I can federally, as an individual citizen, because the Liberals opened it up -- though they seem to be circling the wagons again so as to avoid real change, but why not do this provincially?

I have an on-again, off-again relationship with blogging but I'm going to try to put up a concrete case for my favourite form of electoral reform applying it to this province alone. Regionalized Proportionality would work in BC -- I think really well. I am convinced that it would rejuvenate our democracy by making the governments we send to Victoria reflect who we are more closely and more simply than any other system I've seen.

No offence to the STV guys -- they're smart, they're the brains... and unfortunately, while I understand its strengths, its details are just too complicated for most voters to care enough to spend the time to look at it closely enough not be confused by it. Especially not while we (at least in some of the metro areas) are trying to afford living in what Fotheringham often called "Lotus Land" and "British California" -- as if we're that sunny (except for the Okanagan in summer), as if we can spend all that time on leisure (but many of us do).

In brief, my idea is to coalesce the ridings that sprawl across individual metro areas into single districts that elect as many members as the seats that were coalesced, but does so from a single ballot proportional list. The rural people still get "their local MLA" but the not-very-marginal but not-big-enough-to-command-local-majorities blocs that exist in the metro areas might actually send MLAs to Victoria that reflect what they want to see happen.

Okay, I nearly typed it: "what we want to see happen". Neither the NDP nor the BC Liberals reflect what I want to see happen and I have had it up to my eyebrows and above with the hate-and-fear filled campaigns I've seen nearly all of my adult life, stretching back certainly to Mr. Vander Zalm's campaigns, and imbibed in by both parties up until the present day. My vote has been parked with one particular party because I view them as the least impossible, least dubious other option.

Minority governments are not scary. The best policies in Canada were brought in under minority parliaments. If the parties know that they'll never get a majority but will always have to play nice, perhaps we'll see more constructive policy synergy and less playing off fear. Perhaps money will have less of an influence in the outcome. Perhaps not.

But this is what I want. Politically, this is what I think is worth working toward and I'm going to put out a few more articles over the next few week/months analysing for instance how my proposal might change our current electoral map. It will only be marginally interesting to see what electoral outcomes under such a situation would be but I'll put that out too as I can manage it. But it's only marginally relevant because I believe it will raise voter turn out and change other aspects of the campaigns significantly so that voting patterns will change in ways I cannot foresee.

Still listening?

Haiku #36 -- Haikus in tension

What is politics?

Real work. Making society

better day by day.

What is politics?

Distraction from the real work

of daily kindness.