Quote:
Originally Posted by redforever
The problem with constituencies in Canada is due to how electoral districts or constituencies are determined in the first place.
Take for instance PEI.
To determine electoral districts, the population of Canada is divided by 279, the number of seats in Parliament in 1985 when the formula was developed.
So Canada has about 35 million people. Dividing by 279, that comes out to about 125,000 people per electoral district.
That number is then used to determine electoral districts in each province. PEI has about 150,000 people so they should get 2 electoral districts...but they have 4.
Why you might ask? Because our constitution mandates that no province can have fewer electoral districts than senate seats. PEI was granted 4 senate seats so even though their population does not justify 4 electoral districts, they still get them because of how the senate is set up.
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A province also can't lose seats...
Did a little calculation, and if you still give a seat to each of the three territories, that leaves 335 seats, or one for about every 112,000 people or so. If you could divide all the seats out strictly by population, the biggest winner would be:
Ontario, with 9 more.
Also gaining seats would be:
Alberta (5)
BC (3)
Losing seats would be:
Sask (4)
PEI, NB (3 each)
NS,Man,Quebec (2 each)
Newfoundland (1)