929...Representation By Population

Lorne Gunter, Edmonton Journal writes a big piece this morning praising the powers that be in Ottawa for shuffling the deck and making votes in his province more valuable. The headline

Rep by pop finally coming to Commons

Alberta, B. C., Ontario shortchanged too long merely to placate Quebec

shows a regional bias but he does make some good points. For example, even though we kind of assume that Parliament is equally weighted, Prince Edward Island is the province that gets the most value for their votes. A riding in PEI has about 34,000 voters; one in urban Alberta 130,000. "It takes two Alberta votes to have as much influence as one from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland, New Brunswick or Nova Scotia, and five from Alberta to have as much impact as four from Quebec."

Mr. Gunter goes into great detail about the mechanizations that govern how seats are assigned federally, suffice to say if we were to have true representation by population they would have to move the House of Commons down the street to the 2,300 seat National Arts Centre's Opera House.

This is a step though.

WFDS