As new MPs are coming to Alberta, we have to shoehorn new districts into Edmonton and Calgary.
But the whole situation could be avoided if we used multi-seat districts.
Some Alberta communities push back on proposed changes to federal riding boundaries | CBC News cbc.ca
Yes dividing a city into super-small ridings cannot be easy.
If division is only dividing a city in half, making two multi-member districts, it would be easier.
or if a single city-wide multi-member riding was used, dividing the city would be avoided altogether.
or even using two-seat ridings, the problem would be halved.
in Canadian history we have had 11 multi-seat (two-member) ridings.
they avoided the gerrymandering and boundary-drawing issue.
unfortunately each voter had two votes so the largest group (perhaps being not the majority of voters) took both seats
but multiple-voting is not necessary even if we have multi-member districts.
if we wanted more fair elections and easier drawing of ridings, we could adopt ridings with two - or more - seats and then give each voter just one vote
ridings would be larger, take in more territory with less arbitrary separation of voters
Benefits:
No one group likely would take all the seats.in the district, thus preventing artificially-created regional or city-wide one-party sweeps and unbalanced regionalism.
wider choice for voters not just party versus party but even among candidates of same party
variety elected includes party of first preference of most or many voters or if not, at least a party that closely resembles party of first preference.
a voter could vote for candidate he or she likes in the larger riding instead of being confined to just candidates running in just 1/10th of the city or whatever single-member riding would be.
less or none arguments about where to draw riding boundaries
more votes (larger proportion) used to actually elect members. As few as 18 percent of the votes cast sometimes elect single member in a district, an impossibility in a MM district where voters have just one vote.
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if we add ranked votes to the single voting in MM district, it would make for cleaner election - less vote splitting and votes wasted
but transferable votes are not strictly necessary -
single-voting in a MM district produces more fair elections, higher level of voter satisfaction than FPTP in the present single-member districts.
Our sister Commonwealth country Vanuatu uses Single Non-transferable Voting and the results are clearly more fair than we get in Canada using FPTP.
see my blog for more info
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