The biggest fight at Confederation was over the principle of representation by population. The pre-Confederation province of Canada, formed out of the union of Upper and Lower Canada, had allotted each an equal number of seats in Parliament, though their populations were highly unequal. Reformers, led by George Brown, fought for the idea that each province should be represented in Parliament in proportion to its share of the national population – put another way, that each voter should have equal say in the affairs of the nation, regardless of which province they lived in.
One hundred and fifty-four years after Confederation, what is shaping up to be the biggest fight of the new Parliament? Representation by population.
The Constitution requires that the seats be redistributed after each census, in line with movements in population, according to a precise but convoluted formula. On that basis, a report from the Chief Electoral Officer has proposed adding three seats to Alberta’s representation in the House, plus one each for Ontario and British Columbia. Applying the same legally required formula, it proposes reducing Quebec’s representation by one seat, from 78 to 77. Uh-oh.
There is nothing particularly new in this, it should be pointed out. Seven of the 10 provinces have lost seats at some point in our history, including Quebec, in 1966. Moreover, even after the redistribution, Quebec would still be slightly over-represented, in proportionate terms, while Alberta, Ontario and B.C. would continue to be markedly under-represented.
No matter. The fury in Quebec is unabated. Not only is the province’s political class aghast at the thought of losing even one seat in Parliament – Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet has promised to raise ”the fires of hell” if the government moves ahead with the plan – but they have seized upon the controversy to advance an even more radical proposition: that a floor should be set under the province’s representation, not just as an absolute number, but as a share of the House. In perpetuity.
So if Quebec’s share of the population continued to fall, to 20 per cent or less, its share of the seats would remain pegged at 23 per cent, or 25 per cent, or whatever is decided is the share befitting an officially recognized nation. “I think the nation of Quebec deserves a certain level of representation in the House of Commons,” Premier François Legault opined last month, “regardless of the evolution of the number of inhabitants in each province.”
It’s outrageous, of course. One person, one vote is a bedrock principle, not only of democracy, but of justice, a recognition of the equal worth of every individual. Only, we’d be in a far stronger position to insist on that principle if … we’d ever actually followed it. Instead, right from the start we’ve been tinkering with it. The British North America Act (now the Constitution Act 1867), our founding document, specified that no province would lose seats unless its share of the population had fallen by at least 5 per cent.
The “Senate floor” followed in 1915, guaranteeing that no province could have fewer seats in the House than it had senators. That ensures the over-representation of the four Atlantic provinces. Then there’s the “grandfather clause” in the 1985 Representation Act passed by the Mulroney government, which provides that no province may have no fewer seats than it had at that time. So Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec are also over-represented.
Yet a third rule stipulates that no province that was over-represented at the past redistribution can be under-represented at the next. This was a gift from the Harper government, via the 2011 Fair Representation Act. Having initially proposed to increase the number of seats only in Ontario, B.C. and Alberta, it found itself under ferocious attack in Quebec merely for leaving the province’s number of seats unchanged. That was soon remedied: the province was hastily awarded another three seats.
After this fracas, we will undoubtedly add still a fourth rule: Quebec’s representation can never go down – in absolute terms, if not as a proportion of the whole (that would require a constitutional amendment).
It’s a small thing, perhaps: so Quebec gets 78 seats instead of 77, so what? Except the cumulative effect of all these rules has been to make representation by population virtually impossible. Indeed, Canada has one of the most unequal franchises in the democratic world. An example: The four Atlantic provinces have between them about half the population of Alberta. Yet they have nearly as many seats: 32 to 34. Alberta seems less and less in a mood to overlook these anomalies.
Until now the operating principle in Ottawa has been that pacifying Quebec is the path of least resistance. We may be about to test that proposition.
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Andrew Coyne