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Report of the Federal Electoral Boundaries
Commission for British Columbia
The
Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission for British Columbia was established on
April 16, 2002, pursuant to the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act
(the "Act"), to reconfigure the electoral boundaries of British Columbia’s
federal electoral districts for representation of the province in the House of
Commons. The Commission was mandated to provide for 36 electoral districts, an
increase of two over the previous representation, as a consequence of changes
in the province’s population that had reached 3,907,738 in the 2001 decennial
census. The Act mandates boundary readjustments every 10 years to take into
account changes in both population size and distribution within a province.
The
starting point for the Commission was the Act’s definition of electoral quota,
which is determined by dividing the population by the number of electoral
districts to be established. For British Columbia, this resulted in an
electoral quota of 108,548. The Act (section 15) requires that the population
of each electoral district shall, "as close as reasonably possible", correspond
to the electoral quota. In making its decisions about reasonable electoral
district boundaries, the Commission is mandated to consider the following: "the
community of interest or community of identity in or the historical pattern of
an electoral district," and "a manageable geographic size for districts in
sparsely populated, rural or northern regions of the province." While the Act
allows a deviation, up or down, from the electoral quota by as much as 25
percent, the animating spirit of the Act is the principle of one person, one
vote.
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