It’s called the Fair Representation Act and its failure to garner any support is a testament to the lust for power from our current members of the House. FRA is better for voters; the current system favors big money and entrenched politicians.
In a just system we would not only have the FRA but a House double its current size as well. It’s a sick joke that control of the House is more likely to be left to the courts than to the voters.
This is a more fundamental question than just for electoral redistribution, and I think part of my answer is that Canadian politics is just not as partisan as it is in the US. Why that is would probably take a deep drive into political science and sociology. I don’t have a ready answer.
Some purely speculative comments:
our politics isn’t an all-the-time thing, the way the US seems to be. I vote federally once every four years. I vote provincially once every four years, on a different cycle. I vote municipally every four years, on a different cycle. That’s it. It’s easy to be relatively disengaged from politics.
We don’t have government-run primaries to nominate a party’s candidate, and we certainly don’t ever have to register on a government-run, public listing of supporters of a political party.
only die-hard party members participate in the nomination process.
being a party member has a real meaning here. A pretty small percentage of citizens actually belong to a party. Most people are non-affiliated.
Money. There are limits on how much anyone can contribute to parties or political campaigns. The field isn’t swamped with mailings and texts saying that the country will fall apart if you don’t donate NOW!
if you’re not a member of a party and haven’t donated to a party, you’re far less likely to get mail-outs, texts, etc. asking for money
we have non-partisanship built into our institutions. The Speaker of a legislative body is an impartial chair, not a party leader.
judges are non-partisan. They’re not elected and are required to cut off any political ties they may have had. It’s a breach of the federal judicial code of ethics (which applies to all federally-appointed judges, including Supreme Court judges) to donate to a political party or support a party.
public servants are non-partisan. It’s required by legislation that public servants not be politically active on the job.
prosecutions are non-partisan. We don’t elect Crown prosecutors.
policing is non-partisan. We don’t elect police chiefs.
administration of elections is non-partisan. The Chief Electoral Officer who runs federal elections is appointed by the House of Commons, normally with all-party support. To be appointed, the CEO has to have a personal reputation for fairness and non-partisanship. That non-partisanship runs throughout Elections Canada. Their job is to run free and fair elections, without favouring any party. The same approach is used provincially.
Those are just some of the things that come to mind. Overall, it is a culture where people can be, and in many cases are required to be, non-partisan.
ETA: one thought I’ve long had is that the more public officials are chosen by election, the more partisan your society becomes, because elections by their nature are partisan. But if you have significant numbers of public officials chosen by appointments, with no elections required, the less partisan your society will be. That’s just my personal opinion; can’t back it up with a cite. But please note the number of positions I’ve mentioned above that are appointed in Canada, elected in the States. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. The more common elections are, the greater the partisanship will likely be, in my opinion.
One other thing that I just thought of: we don’t have the perpetual election campaigning that seems to be a feature of US politics. That probably helps drive the partisanship, because it’s so omnipresent, especially with respect to the presidential election.
One reason for the perpetual campaign in the US is that presidential aspirants need to get the nominations, so every four years you have a national campaign starting a year before the presidential election, as is happening right now, with the first GOP debates in August, more than a year before the actual presidential election.
That doesn’t happen in our system. Since we have a parliamentary system, each party needs a leader all the time, not just in the run-up to the general election. The leaders of the parties are chosen well in advance of the next election, and by the members of the party. There is no general public campaign for leadership, but instead a campaign focussed on the party membership. Once elected leader by the party, the leaders tend to hang on for more than one election (except the current incarnation of the Conservative Party federally, which devours each unsuccessful leader after an election).
Here’s the leaders of the five current parties in the House of Commons, and their start dates:
| Leader | Party | Leader since | General elections as leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trudeau | Liberal | 2013 | 3 |
| Poilievre | Conservative | 2022 | 0 |
| Singh | NDP | 2017 | 2 |
| Blanchet | Bloc Québécois | 2019 | 2 |
| May | Green Party | 2006 to 2019; 2022 | 4 |
Our next election is scheduled for 2026. Barring any resignations from any of the leaders, this will be the line-up. (There have been rumours that Trudeau might step down, but I’ve not seen any sign of it.)
At the House of Commons level, there’s a similar dynamic. Since each Commons normally lasts four years, MPs don’t have to be campaigning all the time, unlike members of the House of Representatives, with their two-year terms. It’s also very rare for an incumbent MP to face a nomination challenge from within their party. It does happen, but it’s rare. And, when it does happen, it’s only within the party, not an open public primary.
Getting back to the thead topic (and apologies for the long digression into non-partisanship), here’s the link to the electoral boundary redistribution process in Canada. There’s one commission for each of the ten provinces.
Even though that redistribution is going on, the only reason I knew about it was because a friend of mine mentioned it to me, and I went “oh, right - there was a census in 2021, so new boundaries coming up.” Don’t recall seeing any mention of it in the media.
For my province, the draft map was tabled in the Commons in December, and the final map in April, so it’s now in effect for the next election.
No media comment that I can recall. It’s just not an issue.
ETA: I got curious, so I went googling. Confirming my personal experience, there hasn’t been a lot of media attention. But, I did find one article that deals with redistribution in a general way:
I’ve never understood this passion to increase the size of the House. 1000 Representatives would be an uncontrollable nightmare.
If you use the proposed Wyoming rule, then the House would be 575 members. That would establish better parity amongst the states, and indirectly change the electoral college votes to reflect population better.
575 would still be lower than the cube root of the total population, which poli-sci stats people say is what many representative bodies tend to converge on.
Figures used to calculate:
331,449,281 is 2021 US census
576,851 is 2020 Wyoming population
Cube root of total US population is 692.
Districts have too many people in them.
By having so few of them, each one holds entirely too much individual power. The stakes are high and attract the influence of big donors.
There’s not enough of them to do the work. After subtracting 40-49% of the work force for being obstructionist (I know, it shouldn’t be this way) and a third of a congressperson’s time spent fundraising, we’re reduced to the work product of 100. At a time when it’s already understaffed.
What NorthernPiper says about Canada pretty much goes for the UK too, in respect of non-partisan/professional management of electoral processes, as well as having limits on campaigning expenditure, and less frenetic/extended electoral campaigning seasons.
That and a continuing public service culture (albeit one that parts of mainly the right increasingly dismiss as “the blob” that in their view obstructs and obfuscates their brilliantly radical disruptions by confronting them with that petty inconvenience called “reality”).
PS: if the “cube root” principle were applied in the UK, we’d have barely 400 MPs, instead of 650. Can’t see that happening. As for the idea that a lower house of nearly 1000 would be unmanageable - well, the European Parliament seems to manage 700+ without descending into chaos, but then, it’s part of a different sort of policymaking/legislative process that’s aimed at achieving as close to consensus as possible.
My feeling is that if you go up to 1000, more of them will spend all their time fighting to be heard - as they do now - and only 50 will do the hard work. The Law of Diminishing Returns is the principle here.
Depends what you mean is the hard work. Representing their constituents who have problems with the federal government should become easier if they have fewer constituents.
And with more representatives, each accountable to a smaller grouo of constituents, it becomes harder to buy enough politicians’ loyalty to get bills passed.
If you’re campaigning for a smaller group of people it also becomes more reasonable to put spending limits in place.
From what little I have heard of Parliament, it seems they do quite a bit of screaming and ridiculing. I am surprised they can conduct a session. Did Churchill interact like this?
Oh to be a Canadian.
But everyone gets health care, so you must wait in line with nasty poor people.
That doesn’t really address their point at all. Regardless of whether you are Canadian or American, it should both be easier for you to represent 30,000 people (the original limit) than 760,000 people (the current average for my state) AND it should be much easier for me to get heard by you if I am one of 30,000 people rather than one of 760,000.
Now, 11,000 representatives probably IS just a bit much (at least, it would be a massive disruption to jump right to that number). But 535 is an insanely low number for how many people they are supposed to represent, and with modern technology any limit on the size of the House is completely arbitrary.
Should we then give each state four senators?
That’s a whole different kettle of fish; the senate is inherently antidemocratic and unrepresentative by design (due to a nasty elitist streak among the Founding Fathers). It should be made proportionally representative as well, or perhaps just drastically reduced in importance like the British House of Lords. Changing the number of senators per state would do nothing to fix these issues, so it’s really pretty irrelevant how many senators we have.
You’re missing my point. How much representing do today’s representatives do? They have home offices and they regularly visit their districts, but how much of their job is representation? (Not to mention that in today’s America, people scream that representatives do nothing and are distant when they are in Washington, and scream that they’re not doing any work when they’re not.)
If the only argument is taking care of home district complaints about passports or whatever, then sure, the more the better. If, however, their purpose is to pass laws for the betterment of their districts, more is less. Remember when Congress supposedly abolished “pork” projects? What did anybody think pork consisted of other than goodie baskets for the home crowd? The other alternative is the spectacle today in Washington of Representatives loading up vital budget bills with thousands of culture war amendments. Do we need twice that number?
Exactly the opposite. Who is easier to buy today, 1 of 435 Representatives or 1 of 100 Senators? Obviously, Representatives are cheaper. Doubling the number doesn’t change that. So you have twice as many but each costs half as much as before because now you’ve empowered the local wealthy, making it easier to wield influence because there is less competition.
Senators show this. Manchin, from a small state like West Virginia, is wholly owned by the coal interests. Who owns Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla of California, or Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York? They rake in the big bucks, but no single individual or industry controls them because it’s too expensive. And, hard as it is to believe at times, the Senate is the body of reason and moderation, at least compared to the House, which is beyond all rational conception. Does anybody believe that doubling the number of House members will give the people more voice, lower the animosities, and get the body to concentrate on legislation? I don’t, and I’m saying so loudly.
I’m going to say this even more loudly, Soylent Green-style. The House of Representatives ARE PEOPLE!
People are the problem. Technology is utterly irrelevant.
Honestly, I don’t think they do much representing. Nor do I think people expect them to. We vote for people in Congress to advance whatever political things we want them to do on a national scale, which is mostly going to conform with the R or D after their name.
There is plenty of legislative work and administrative oversight to do. We see it being done all the time in more modern and representative democracies.