Consider for example how the Lesser Slave Lake provincial constituency covers, in addition to two towns, 11 First Nations Bands, three Metis settlements and the entire rural municipality of Opportunity, also parts of three other rural municipalities (as reported in the Alberta Views, March 2021).
You would think if farmers were gathered together in a rural municipality, it would make sense to move them as one into a provincial district. The failure to do so leads some to suspect gerrymandering.
Perhaps that parts of these rural municipalities, for some reason, were less friendly to the party in power so the voters there were spliced away.
Or perhaps the three RMDs were split out of desire to put those parts of the three RMDs where voters most commonly vote Conservative into the Lesser Slave Lake district, to gather into LSL district those most likely to vote for the candidate belonging to the party in power. The fact that a Conservative won every election from 1989 to 2012 adds credence to this latter accusation.
But if rural municipalities were taken as whole units and provincial districts drawn to fit them in that way, there would be no - or much less - appearance of gerrymandering.
(The Lesser Slave Lake district is an arbitrary territory, a square with no natural boundaries. The square shape would lead one to think it is not gerrymandered but in fact it is the most gerrymandered. Its boundaries are not based on flowing natural shapes nor on boundaries of the pre-existing rural municipal districts. Its boundaries are totally arbitrary, man-made and thus artificial - the very definition of gerrymandering.)
And if this is difficult due to the RMDs not fitting neatly into the required population size of a provincial district, then multi-member districts, districts that elect varying number of MLAs proportional to the number of votes - could take care of that. With the use of multi-member districts, there would be no requirement to have each district elect the same number of MLAs (one per as in FPTP).
But if three or four RMDs had the population of two provincial districts, they could be grouped and given two MLAs, allowing the production of mixed representation if voters voted that way. That is just one example.
The flexibility created by multi-member districts could be used to ensure that the use of existing political-geographical entities, such as counties or RMDs, did not affect the approximate equality of representation.
And under multi-member districts, many more votes would be effective, many more voters would see someone they approved of elected, compared to the great number of dissatisfied voters in each election under our current FPTP system.
Thanks for reading.
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