That would be me. I stand behind my plan for the simple reason that we have no effective representation. You just don't know what a real large rural riding is.
Which I linked back to. And I agree, there isn't effective representation. It has nothing to do with "large rural areas" vs "urban areas". It has everything to do with rural areas voting one way and urban voting another based on lifestyles, preferences and lack of the other parties being able to prove that they can do just as well as the standard/usual party elected (urban usually goes Liberal, so Cons proving they can be just as good representational wise to urban people, for example. And Liberals showing rural areas that they're not just for the "rich urbanites".)
Wrong. It does not mean multiple votes for one person.
And yet, that's what you said.
""We could easily level the playing field by giving large rural ridings extra votes based on either sq. Km. (extra votes would mean more votes per person in that area) Or number of communities represented (again, extra votes per person based on population per community which would further break down into who exactly gets to have the extra votes?).""
MPs are still elected the same way.
Then what would be the difference/change?
And I specified LARGE rural ridings. Not your little suburban areas.
"Little suburban areas".
Yeah... pretty sure there aren't any of those around here. We have urban areas, and rural areas.
Think Yukon and NWT and the large ridings in the western provinces.
I actually was when considering your post and the area you're talking about. Even looked into it if you look at the original reply/breakdown.
I never came up with a specific number, but think along the lines of more than 2 hr drive from one end of the riding to the other end, or more than 10 communities represented.
Oh now see, now you're really clarifying which you hadn't done yet.
But still "more votes" would mean people getting more than one vote.
Perhaps smaller when the only access is by boat or air. I would support the same provincially, because the problem is the same. There is effectively no representation outside large urban centers.
But there is representation. Each area is represented equally, it's just that the people VOTE differently from urban to rural areas.
The actual issue isn't the areas themselves, it's who the people vote for, why they vote that way, and the other side not doing a good enough job to tell people why they should be voted for. And it's also dependent on whether it's federal or provincial politics.
Federally, my riding always ends up voting Liberal regardless, because French people = Liberal in NB.
Provincially this same riding is divided smaller (of course) and suddenly while the French area votes Liberal almost always, sometimes the more English part of it now gets more of a say and we've gone Liberal, Con AND Green (currently, and she's actually been the best MLA we've had for decades).
I think the riding size is 75K per riding. If you want smaller ridings, you would make it lets say 35K per riding. This would virtually double the number of sitting MPs from all regions. Yes they will be more responsive when dealing with local constituents but now a days this is such a small part of their job. Do we really need twice as many freeloaders sucking the government tit?
If you are trying to say ridings in different areas should be treated differently, no. We already have Quebec for that. We don't need more whiners.
Exactly.
Although I'd put in that even the smaller ridings wouldn't mean greater chances for people's voices/votes to matter. It'd still, as you said, just make more MP's but not necessarily fix the actual problems of people mattering.