Districts - when are they too large?

We can all wish for direct representation where every single voter has a representative for himself or herself in the chamber tht makes laws that we live under

But that is impossible, so we have to group voters into groups with each group having a representative.

Of course if the representative shares the sentiments of the group then representation is good, in fact who would want to be represented by someone who does not share your views.

But that is what about half of us have to live with under the geographic districts that we use today in Canada.

What we actually want and what we assume we get in our elections is representation of an unanimous constituency, a group that is voluntarily formed of people of like minds who elect a person to represent them.

So we need to have multi-member districts (or some sort of multi-winner contest), where voters can self-sort and elect each to to their own.

In Edmonton we have different wards for the school board, for the city council, for mayor, for MLAs and for MPs.

The mayor is the largest districting, covering the whole city;

The 20 or so MLAs in Edmonton use the smallest districts.

Although in each type of district they are meant to have consistent number of voters (because each has just one member), in general, ridings do cover different number of people and have widely varying geographic sizes.

We accept (or expect) that one member can represent an area that is up to 800,000 or more sq. kms in size.

In Canada in the Territories, three MLAs cover about half the country.

Nunavut's one MP represents a district that covers 1.9M square kilometres.

If we assume that the large riding of Desnethe-Missinippi-Churchill River produces local representation (as single-member districts are reputed to do), we have the idea that an area that is 340,000 sq. kms in size is a local district.

Therefore any MMD that is smaller than that size would also be local.

(It is logical to make that assumption.)

All but 17 ridings in Canada (as drawn in 2013) were smaller than a third of that 340,000 sq. kms. (these 17 ridings run from Nunavut to Algoma in a by-size listing.)

From Algoma to Yelowhead in that listing is only about 8 ridings. These are small enough to be put with two others and still be short of the Algoma 340,000 sq. kms. But they are scattered over five provinces so do not nearly fit into three-seat districts. But they could be combined with two or three smaller districts and still be under the 340,000-sq-km limit.

Anything smaller than the Yellowhead riding (which covers 76,000 sq. kms) is small enough to be grouped with four other ridings to make a five-seat MMD). and that takes in about 320 of Canada's ridings.

And some districts smaller than that can be grouped into MMDs with district magnitude up to say 9, or more.

Likely under a PR system, ridings would need to be redrawn. The flexibility, which using varying DM allows, would allow ridings to be drawn based on pre-existing units such as cities, counties, etc.

But the above data shows that what is local ranges widely under FPTP and is not some golden rule based on facts on the ground - the arbitrary boundaries of the ridings are not anything substantial on the ground in many cases.

And opinion in each district is so mixed that in many cases the majority of votes are ignored and representation by a single member is an easily-punctured myth.

Each city can easily be one city-wide district. The mayor alone represents the whole city.

Every city in Canada is smaller than the 340,000-sq.-km. geographic limit so there isno problem that way to using a whole city as a district.

the limit imposed by having a consistent population-per-member ratio will impact that for Toronto and the largest cities anyway. so in those cases half-cities or some fraction may be required to draw districts.

A county is a unit of local government and if too small itself to be a district, it can be used as a "building block" to compose a multi-county district.

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