Quote:
Originally Posted by Ozy_Flame
One thing I will add, this growing urban/rural divide is indicative of a need for electoral reform. Cities are just going to grow in size and demographics as society progressively changes and I believe it's important to have a voting system that ensures all votes count, not just the minimum threshold. This is true on both the provincial and the federal level.
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheIronMaiden
Is the weight of the rural riding votes that much heavier? Do you have stats for this, or do you just want their votes to count less because you have different priorities?
|
This is true, and is happening across the country, not just Alberta. I don't know what the solution is and both groups deserve to have their voices heard. Alberta has been slightly heavier in weighting rural ridings vs urban in order to try an balance the rural/urban voices. If you look at the electoral map and populations it likely shows many rural ridings on the low side of the acceptable population and many urban ridings on the high side. So some pretty significant differences in population between some rural ridings and some urban ridings. There's only so much that can be done too. Some of the rural ridings are massive in size yet sparsely inhabited, making them even larger geographically makes them impossible to represent for a single MLA and they are too diverse.
At the end of the day you just hope that whomever is governing will at least listen to all sides. We cannot always go with majority rules for everything.