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Originally Posted by Lubicon
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.
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Things are actually pretty balanced in Alberta. I looked at the distribution/representation a little while ago and based on the last reported population data it is such that the largest 8 population centers in Alberta (Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge , St Albert, Airdrie, Grande Prairie and Medicine Hat) have about 66% of the population and they are represented by 58 ridings which is 65% of the seats in the Legislature. Calgary and Edmonton are 54% of the population and have 52% of the seats.
The average population in a riding is just under 49,000 and the median is just over 48,000. The average for urban riding is just over 50,000 and the average for rural is just over 46,000.
There are some anomalies to be worked out such as a couple small rural ridings and a few low 40k urban ridings plus some overly large ridings like Airdrie.