BC's Electoral Boundaries Commission is Whack

25 Oct 2022

TL;DR: The BC Electoral Boundaries Commission is afraid to do its job, and as a result is subjecting the province to two more election cycles run on ridiculously misapportioned boundaries, in which a vote in the least populated northern riding will be 3-times more powerful than a vote in largest urban riding.

I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to write about the 2022 British Columbia Electoral Boundary Commission, looking for just the right chart or graph, and not really coming up with anything that tells the whole story.

For those from away: British Columbia’s provincial government is elected in a British-style first-past-the-post election to a uni-cameral legislature. The electoral districts (aka “ridings”) are re-drawn every two election cycles by a non-partisan “Electoral Boundary Commission”. While new maps will subtley differ in partisan “efficiency”, in practice the commission system has successfully avoided getting tangled up in controversy about partisan outputs. What it has not avoided is slowly but implacably transferring electoral power to the underpopulated hinterlands of the province, and that is what I want to talk about here.

Why Commisssions?

The reason we have a commission process at all is because in the 1980’s the politicians completely screwed up drawing boundaries. Given a choice, what kind of new map does a politician want? They want exactly the same map as last time. They won last time. They know all the neighborhoods from last time. They know all the people who live in their riding right now. Do not change the f’ing map!.

Well, in 1984 the government of the day brought in a redistricting law that, in statute, allowed the metropolitan areas of the province to have a lot more people per riding than the rural areas. To quote the 2022 Commission’s Interim Report:

The 1984 statute divided the province’s electoral districts into five different categories based on population density. Metropolitan districts (for example, Vancouver and Victoria) were allowed to have populations that were over 100% larger than the most sparsely populated ridings. The Supreme Court of British Columbia struck down the law, finding that it violated the right to vote in section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by making the value of one person’s vote so different from another person’s vote depending on where they lived.

So, in 1984, the Supreme Court struck down a law that envisioned a misapportionment of 2:1 between the smallest and largest ridings in the province.

Keep that number, 2:1, in mind, it will be important later.

The government brought in new legislation establishing an independent boundary commission

The is because in 1984 the government of British Columbia brought in a

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