Site MenuTransposition of Votes – 2013 Representation Order
2. Background
After each decennial census of population by Statistics Canada, representation of the provinces is readjusted in accordance with the Constitution Act, 1867 and the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act. Independent boundaries commissions are established for each province to consider and report on any changes required to the boundaries of federal electoral districts. As Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut constitute only one federal electoral district each, they do not require electoral boundaries commissions and are considered as unchanged federal electoral districts.
The new FEDs in this report were proclaimed by the Representation Order of October 1, 2013. They will be in effect for a federal general election called any time after May 1, 2014; according to the Act, the next general election is scheduled for October 19, 2015. By-elections called before a general election would be conducted using the 308 electoral districts under the 2003 Representation Order (referred to hereafter as old FEDs).
The boundaries of 44 FEDs remain unchanged from the 2003 Representation Order; the list of unchanged FEDs is given in the Appendix. Thus, in these FEDs the transposition of votes to the new Representation Order involves only a restatement of the results of the 2011 general election. For the remaining 294 new FEDs, votes were directly reallocated by restating the voting results of 69,335 polling divisions (97.9 percent) to the corresponding new FEDs. For the 1,517 polling divisions (2.1 percent) that were split by new FED boundaries, the reallocation of votes was done using information on electors’ addresses. The method used for the transposition is presented in more detail in the following section.
Where population numbers are given, they refer to the total population based on the 2011 Census of Population. They are either published by Statistics Canada or derived as described in the following section.