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Strange cartography
You’ve got to wonder what the folks on the Federal Elections Boundaries Commission were imbibing the night they sat down in an Ottawa pub and decided on the criteria for re-tooling the constituencies in our part of Ontario (see our story on page 7, as well as the comments of some of our columnists on pages 3 and 14).
To begin with, we’re not really certain who decided we had to spend millions of dollars every year on putting 30 more MPs in Parliament (of which we in Ontario get half). Any of our readers who have ever visited Ottawa will know they’re going to have to be shoehorned into the House of Commons - and where will they find offices for all these extra politicos? It would have been more practical, of course, to just re-distribute the 308 seats we already have, but in order to give more seats to Ontario or BC or Alberta, they’d have had to take away some from Manitoba or Newfoundland, and that would have been a very hard sell. Much cheaper poltically to just keep expanding Parliament until it bursts.
Anyway, accepting that we need more seats, why bother re-drawing the boundaries in areas with marginal growth? Compared to areas like Milton or Vaughan or even Barrie, the municipalities in the current Durham riding, or in the new Haliburton-Uxbridge riding, have hardly seen a population explosion in the decade since the last re-distribution. It would have been very simple to just leave us alone.
But exercises like these are make-work projects, so it’s fun for the members of the Commission to justify their salaries by doing all sorts of highly creative map-making. But why would they decide that Goodwood has more in common with Fenelon Falls than it does with Sandford or Leaskdale? There is no good reason, of course, nor do they need to justify their proposal. Sigh.
The re-drawing of our constituency boundary also has the effect of creating a lame-duck MP when we finally get to have our very expensive by-election caused by the abrupt resignation of Bev Oda. The new MP, probably from Clarington as Bev was, won’t have a lot of incentive to get to know Uxbridge and Scugog when they’ll no longer be electorally connected to his or her hometown only a couple of years down the road. And even if our MP is from Uxbridge or Scugog, all the time spent canvassing in Clarington will have been totally wasted, because in 2015 (assuming his new constituents even re-nominate her), she’ll be exploring the wilds of Haliburton instead of cruising the shores of Rice Lake.
There is an opportunity on Nov. 13 in Oshawa for the public to tell the Commission members how insane they are, and to go back to the drawing board. It’s probably a lost cause to hope we could maintain our current riding boundaries and make the upcoming by-election meaningful. But maybe, just maybe, we could at least persuade them to get rid of the line along Davis Drive. Put all of us with Haliburton, or more logically, put all of us with York-Simcoe.
History tells us it will all change in another decade anyway. But at least we could pretend that logic matters for another few elections.
July 14, 2011
