EVERY VOTE MUST COUNT EQUALLY
As provincial columnist Graham Thomson conceded earlier this week, the challenge of redrawing legislative riding boundaries isn’t exactly the largest alligator coming out of the swamp at the Notley government.
Indeed, results on election night last May significantly weakened the partisan imperative for changing a system clearly biased in favour of rural and small-town voters. The NDP actually won two of the three seats with the smallest voter lists as well as two of the three with the largest.
Why then should the Alberta government spend energy and risk controversy on the issue?
Well, because the status quo isn’t democratic.
Because there is no reasonable justification for it when MLAs no longer need a horse to get around to their constituents.
And because to leave “well-enough” alone would sell short ordinary Albertans’ fundamental sense of fairness.
True, modern-day Alberta has no equivalent of the “rotten boroughs,” some with as few as 50 voters, that sent MPs to the British Parliament in the first half of the 19th century.
We do, however, have an enormous range of riding sizes that give some voters twice the voice in choosing MLAs that others have.
Consider, for example, the northern riding of Dunvegan-Central Peace-Notley, won in May by the NDP’s Margaret McCuaig-Boyd, now minister of energy. It had 14,300 names on the 2014 voters’ list, and just 3,692 of them were enough to make McCuaig-Boyd a winner.
Compare that to Spruce Grove-St. Albert, with 34,347 voters, and Calgary Southeast, with 34,216. The New Democrats won the former and the PCs the latter — but what’s really interesting is the support even the losers had.
In Spruce Grove-St. Albert, Rus Matichuk was clobbered by an almost two-to-one margin, and still rolled up 6,362 votes, almost 2,700 more than McCuaig-Boyd needed. In Calgary-South East, the NDP loser had 7,358, and even third-place Wildrose had 6,892.
How could this be possible? Well, one reason is that suburban big-city constituencies have seen very rapid growth since the last set of new boundaries was drawn in 2010.
But the underlying reality is that inequality was accepted from the outset: to take into account sparseness of population, the system allows for ridings to vary 25 per cent from the average the day the new boundaries take effect, and provides for up to four to have even greater variance.
Perhaps this made some sense before email, the Internet and the internal combustion engine. But now? The real issue is a very selective worry that rural voters could get forgotten in an increasingly urban country.
But why, at the federal as well as provincial level, do we think this particular demographic should get a special deal, when it is apparently acceptable for other bodies of voters, for example as defined by age, gender, income or ethnicity, to get lost in the first-past-the-post shuffle?
If large, lightly populated regions are harder for MLAs to serve, give them an assistant, not an extra vote in the legislature.
In Alberta’s recent past, this issue seemed of little practical importance because successive Conservative governments had the votes to win most of the seats whatever the rules. In our new, competitive reality, however, it was a very distinct possibility that a party dominating Alberta’s rural seats could have won at least a minority in May with fewer votes than the supposed loser.
We need a new system of apportioning seats that places more emphasis on giving all voters similar electoral clout. Greater political equality is surely the kind of legacy Rachel Notley’s team would like to leave behind.