Bridging the urban-rural divide

Electoral boundaries commission struggles to balance geography and vote equality

If you want your vote to really matter, head north, all the way up to Fort McMurray-Conklin.

Thanks to low turnout and a small population, your vote would have been one of only 6,700 ballots in the 2015 provincial election. Compare that to St. Albert-Spruce Grove where your vote would have drowned among 24,805 others.

The smallest riding in Alberta contains about 25,000 people, while the largest has nearly 80,000. Based on census information, the average riding in Alberta should have about 46,700 people.

This is what the province’s electoral boundaries commission is grappling with as it reviews the boundaries of Alberta’s 87 electoral constituencies. The commission is to release an interim report May 31 and a final report Oct. 31.

“Bottom line, it’s not a straight mathematical exercise,” said Justice Myra Bielby, chairwoman of the commission. “One of the tensions here is balancing the right of equality of vote. But the overall question we have to answer is how can we make effective representation for Albertans.”

Bielby said that includes taking matters like travel time for rural MLAs and the geographical integrity of the riding into account.

The divide in the province is a stark one and it tends to run along rural and urban lines. Fourteen of the 15 least populace ridings, sorted by eligible voters, are rural ridings. The only urban one, ranked 15th, is Edmonton-Mill Woods.

And with census data released this week showing rural Canada’s share of the population continuing to decline, the contrast is only going to get bigger. In Alberta, the rural population is still growing, just not anywhere close to the frantic pace of the two biggest cities.

In a blog post on the electoral commission, Edmonton public school trustee Michael Janz argued larger, mainly suburban ridings are being shortchanged and all votes should be weighted equally.

Janz wrote that he’s heard from MLAs that it’s hard to get schools built in cities “because of the disproportionate influence that the rural MLAs held over budgets and capital planning decisions.”

Dave Hancock, former premier and MLA for Edmonton- Gold Bar, said that argument is absurd. In an urban area, it’s easier to bus students from a packed school to the next school over. In a rural area, that next school may be more than an hour away, Hancock said.

“Some of our ridings are just so large, when it comes to the miles and miles of highway between the people and the MLA. We’ve got ridings that take five hours to drive across to get from one side to another,” said Al Kemmere, president of the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties.

Kemmere said solutions like video conferencing are great in theory but the more remote an area, the less likely the technology will be up to the task.

“I understand the concerns of the urban areas with the massive population bases they’re dealing with. But at the same time we have to understand accessibility. They have easy access to their MLAs within blocks, but we don’t have that same opportunity.”