Split ridings get too much Marit
Politicians are at their self-serving worst when trying to preserve their own existence. Of course, one expects this from politicians. Every political party at every level of government does it — often under the guise of supporting democracy.
Rural municipal politicians like David Marit did it in this province a dozen years ago when they rejected even discussing amalgamations of rural municipalities, arguing each little RM needed its own local representation to best serve its needs.
We saw some of the same politics last summer on the boundaries commission in which Marit, now president of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities, served as one of three members charged with coming up with a consensus on new boundaries.
The NDP and its supporters basically supported the initial map proposed by the commission — one that would see Regina and Saskatoon each with three urban seats. The province would also have seven “rural” seats and one northern seat.
Conservative politicians and their supporters, however, want to see the status quo from the last electoral map drawn up a dozen years ago — one that divides Regina and Saskatoon like Thanksgiving pumpkin pies into four split urban/rural seats, each dominated by large swaths of rural voters.
This is why we assign such matters to unbiased commissioners tasked with reaching a reasonable consensus. Left to, say, the Conservative government motivated by the desire for safe Saskatchewan seats that are potentially the difference between a majority and minority, it would undoubtedly be democratically unfair.
This is also why Marit’s unprecedented minority report, basically adopting the Conservative position, is troubling.
It would be one thing for a commissioner to write a minority report that simply seems to contain most of the Conservatives’ talking points. It’s quite another for that commissioner to recommend to a Conservative-government dominated parliamentary committee that his minority report be adopted.
And would be a nasty, cynical undemocratic thing for Parliament to ignore the majority will of the Saskatchewan boundaries commission and adopt Marit’s minority report.
Of course, some will argue that Marit is only reflecting his own strongly-held view, which just happens to coincide with the Conservatives’ best interests. Even so, he has willfully ignored a mountain of logic and evidence from last summer’s hearings.
For example, contrary to the argument from Marit and the Conservatives that the new federal ridings will be much too large and unwieldy if we dispense with the existing split rural/urban ridings, no southern riding will be any larger than the current Cypress Hills-Grasslands riding.
Yes, that’s still rather big, but no larger than rural/northern ridings elsewhere in the country. And you don’t see Thunder Bay divided four ways so that Northern Ontario ridings are made smaller. None of the top 30 urban centres in Canada are split to this degree. Even P.E.I.’s Charlottetown has its own federal riding.
Moreover, in today’s world of tweeting and Skyping, the notion that the size of a riding has anything to do with an MP’s accessibility would seem ludicrous. What makes Saskatchewan Conservative MPs inaccessible is their fear of offending the PMO. And what has made them less accessible is an electoral map that’s made their seats safer — even without having to campaign in, or get votes from, the inner cities.
Marit also repeated the Conservative argument that Saskatoon and Regina are not Toronto and that there have always been such urban/ rural splits here. Again, nonsense. We’ve had these four-way splits only since the last Saskatchewan boundary hearings when the commission was bullied into the current cockamamie map that views Wynyard and North Central Regina as communities of similar interest.
In Marit’s minority report, he suggests that business and political presenters to the commission (who happened to be Conservative supporters) know better than the commissioners what’s best for their communities. Really? Local Conservative-minded mayors, councillors and businessmen are more informed and less biased than a respected political scientist and judge?
Finally, Marit ludicrously argued changing the current boundaries will only cause voter apathy.
Really? It would be bigger source of democratic apathy than ignoring the views of the majority? Mandryk is the political columnist for the Leader-Post.