Wow. Who saw that coming?
Before last night I started working on the "party lists" and got some for Fraser Valley, and then much of Vancouver but it became ponderous and, I felt, somewhat pointless, because in reality, this sort of thing should be handled completely differently. I could share them here but it wouldn't add to the discussion really, except to point out that in a consolidated riding, "Independent" candidates are far less meaningful even than they are now.
But last night, when things still looked like ending 42-42-3, I took a look at my consolidated Okanagan riding, Kelowna + Penticton, and decided that collapsing four seats is too few. I ran the same numbers adding Vernon-Monashee and decided even five was too few. I'll present the full data set some time soon but I think, for myself, that any grouping for proportionality's sake, of less than six seats is probably too few. The result would be as arbitrary in its way as the current First-Past-the-Post results look now. It also led me to feel that it would be best to use Metro Vancouver as a single riding. If it turns out (as it may) that even Fraser Valley (six members) and Victoria (seven members) contain too few seats so that the result is too coarse to feel fair, splitting Metro Vancouver into three ridings, (18, 13 and 10 members) would do more harm than good.
Maybe it means, too, that the right way to run this is to consolidate even some of the intermediately-populous ridings together. Does a Thompson-Okanagan riding (10 members: Kelowna's 3, Penticton, Vernon-Monashee, Boundary-Similkameen, Fraser-Nicola, Kamloops' two ridings and Shuswap) make more sense? More data to run! Yum Yum.
Only let's do this on evidence. I understand (from interviews last night) that "Proportional Representation" and "Campaign Finance" are the bedrock issues that the Green's will want as conditions of co-operation. I would be flattered if my mutterings-in-a-corner contributed anything helpful to that discussion.
