Electoral Maps 5

Stockholm wrote:

The new boundaries in Sakatchewan are very good for the NDP. The new all-urban riding of Regina-Lewvan would be a perfect place for Noah Evanchuk to run since he lost so narrowly last time in palliser which was a "rurban" riding larded with very conservative rural areas. In Saskatoon, the new riding of Saskatoon West is drawn to be a safe NDP seat and i here there is a brilliant woman named Nicole White who would be a great candidate there.

So are these new Sask. boundaries definitely going to be implemented then? I thought I read somewhere that these had to go to a Parliamentary committee and that it could choose to adopt the minority report which would preserve the old "rurban" split ridings instead?

I'm also thinking in terms of age, Wilf.

Do you think any of these M.P.s would enjoy the thought of being in the third-place party again after the next election and facing at least another four years untill the Liberals have any hope of being in a position to vie for power again?

Not if they can retire and enjoy their obscene parliamentary pensions, I'd bet!

They can use the excuse of the new riding boundaries as a signal 'It's time for me to go!' and laugh all the way to the bank!

I can see the NDP being in contention for the three new Saskatoon ridings and the other two Regina ridings now, plus Wascana if Goodale does retire.

Let's hope they get their candidates nominated early.

theleftyinvestor wrote:

In the event of a crushing BCNDP majority this year, another consideration is - a large number of experienced BC Liberal politicians will be out looking for work, and potentially running for both the federal Liberals and Conservatives. In fact a friend of mine has speculated Kevin Falcon will want one of those new Surrey ridings as a Conservative.

Falcon lives in Cloverdale—Langley.  (His provincial seat is called Surrey—Cloverdale.)  That will be a fairly safe Conservative seat with no incumbent MP from any party (assuming Mark Warawa runs in Fort Langley—Aldergrove).  I'd say it's very likely that Falcon will run for the Conservatives there.

The latest from SK. CP wire copy:

OTTAWA - The federal Conservative party is acknowledging it commissioned a so-called "push poll" in the Prairies warning would-be voters that changes to their electoral boundaries would undermine "Saskatchewan values."

Read more here.

In case you were wondering if the Harper Conservatives can get any sleazier... they can.

Please tell me progressive individuals and groups will mobilize against this crap?

Why aren't the Conservatives being criticized for gerrymandering?

What's happening in Saskatchewan is a blatant example of how political parties discard the tenets of democracy and gerrymander electoral boundaries in order to benefit themselves undemocratically.

Electoral boundaries should be set up with the objective of insuring that different groups in society are as fairly and accurately represented in Parluament as is possible. Setting up electoral boundaries that allow one political party to win almost every riding with roughly half the votes or even less, should be universally recognized as being illegitimate.

And of course the best solution to the problem of gerrymandering is proportional representation.

The Conservatives do seem to be benefitting from the redistribution being done in Ontario, BC, and, Alberta, so the loss of 2 or 3 seats in Saskatchewan shouldn't be disturbing them as much at it apparently has. But Harper aggressively fights for as much advantage as possible, within legal boundaries or otherwise. If the next election is decided by a couple of seats, he doesn't want a couple of lost seats he could have kept in Saskatchewan to cost him power. So this aggresive campaign to keep the rural-urban seats in Saskatchewan makes sense given the Conservatives take no prisoners style of politics. But the Conservatives must be encouraged overall by how redistribution is enhancing their chances of winning yet another phony FPTP election. According to pollmaps.ca, if people vote in 2015 as they did in 2011, in Ontario, BC, and Alberta, the Liberal seat total will stay the same, the NDP will lose 4 seats, and the Conservatives will gain a whopping 27 seats.

Luckily, with FPTP, small swings in popularity can result in huge swings in seats. Once again the swing in voting patterns in Ontario will go a long way in determining the outcome in 2015 but all things being equal, the Conservatives' chances of winning another phony FPTP election seem to be enhanced by the current redistribution.

It looks like we're going have to wait until next week for the revised Ontario and Quebec maps...

The new downtown Toronto ridings are disappointing. The initial porposals, as some of us observed, were about as good as the NDP could have expected. Trinity-Spadina remained safe and Toronto Centre and St Pauls would have gone NDP by small margins.

Without adding up the numbers I would think the NDP wd still have a small margin in the new Toronto Centre but St Pauls becomes unwinnable. The new University-Rosedale riding is a monstrosity similar to the old Toronto Centre. Good NDP areas in the Annex will be swamped by Rosedale just like Rosedale used to swamp everything south of Bloor.

The new Spadina riding becomes essentially condoland along the water. Although Chow wd have won it, Marchese wd have lost it in the  provincial election.

So we go from one safe NDP seat and two close wins to one marginal NDP seat and one close win.

I expect the Liberals out-generalled us over the final boundary report.

I think the new University-Rosedale" riding could be won by the NDP with the right candidate. The new Toronto Centre is tailor made to be an NDP riding.

Setting aside partisan considerations - given that boundaries are supposed to reflect "communbity of interest" etc...I think you can easily justify the new boundaries. There are three downtown Toronto ridings - one is true inner city and includes skid row, St. jamestown and the Gay Village etc... - Toronto Centre. Another is all condos and apartments and hipsters - Spadina Fort York and another is all intelligentsia and old money - University-Rosedale. It does make some sense!

We don't have to speculate. We could redraw the boundaries right here and see what happens.

http://impolitical.blogspot.ca/2011/07/meet-new-toronto.html

Truthfully, even if the NDP ends up winning the new ridings, the re-districting has the effect of making those ridings more competitive and less safe. So while Liberals and the NDP are spending valuable resources battling each other, the Conservatives will be free elsewhere.

I agree with nicky.  This new University-Rosedale in many respects is like the old provincial riding of St. Andrew-St. Patrick, except stretching east to Rosedale instead of north to St. Clair.  

Chinatown is cut in half and Kensington Market, half of Chinatown and U of T in the same riding of Rosedale make no sense.  

It's unfortunate that the Trinity-Spadina NDP decided to attack the earlier map and call for the Annex to stay in T-S and cut off the waterfront, rather than defend what was a very good map where only some minor changes were needed (i.e. moving the TC/Mount Pleasant boundary down to Dundas west of Yonge and then Bloor east of Yonge in order not to split Church-Wellesley.)  

Instead of having the advantage in 3 out of 4 central Toronto seats, now they're only safe in one and would be lucky to win either University-Rosedale or Spadina-Fort York.   

True but most of the area east of University Ave. isn't exactly NDP territory.  And Dundas is not a good boundary west of University as it rips right through the middle of Chinatown.  University-Rosedale appears to be an "after-thought" of a riding.  

nicky wrote:

Theleftyinvestor makes the point that Rosedale is low density so does not have as many voters as a similar sized area elsewhere. But I think he overlooks two things. First, although Rosedale only comprises about a quarter of TC its turnout is quite high so it casts maybe a third of the votes. Second, the NDP vote in Rosedale is negligible, sometimes less than 10 votes in a poll. 

These factors have allowed Rosedale to dominate TC and they may wellallow it to dominte University-Roseale as well.

One difference though. In the current TC riding, Rosedale has a high turn-out and is lumped in with a lot of south of Bloor areas that tend to have very low turn-outs - e.g. St. jamestown, Regent Park, lots of apartment buildings that are highly transient. In the proposed new University-Rosedale riding - Rosedale is now lumped in with NDP leaning areas in Annex, Seating Village and around the university where "civil society" is very active and that will have equally high turnouts to Rosedale

Dundas street IS a nonsensical boundary. South of Dupont, neighborhoods tend to share commonalities on a north-south axis. Chinatown is largely oriented on Spadina. Professionals are largely oriented on Bay. University is the University (and hospitals). Even all of Bathurst or Ossington shares a similar character from north to south.

Trying to organize things from east to west, you get a really silly combo of Rosedale with UofT with Chinatown with Little Italy.

But the bright side is that it's a very winnable riding for the NDP. I'm sure the Liberals are hoping the map looks more like 2006. But whether they realize it or not, they've potentially watered down the influence of one of the most elitist and wealthy neighborhoods in Canada.

Just eyeballing the 2011 map, the NDP would have dominated Spadina-FtYork and the new Toronto Centre, and still won University-Rosedale.

Not to mention that the low-income and Chinese immigrant communities centered along Dundas St. in T-S now are split into 2 ridings and have their vote diluted.  Alexandra Park for instance gets put in a condo-dominated riding.  

Little Italy, Kensington and Chinatown have no community of interest with Rosedale...at all.  

Maybe the NDP can squeak through in at least one of them but they're terrible in terms of the community of interest principle.

All to "save" the Annex from condos and St. Paul's...sometimes you need to be careful what you wish for!

Lord Palmerston wrote:

Not to mention that the low-income and Chinese immigrant communities centered along Dundas St. in T-S now are split into 2 ridings and have their vote diluted.  Alexandra Park for instance gets put in a condo-dominated riding.  

Little Italy, Kensington and Chinatown have no community of interest with Rosedale...at all.  

Maybe the NDP can squeak through in at least one of them but they're terrible in terms of the community of interest principle.

All to "save" the Annex from condos and St. Paul's...sometimes you need to be careful what you wish for!

I agree that (winning aside), the ridings are nonsense. They don't line up with any sense of shared community. What MP could speak to all those different concerns?

I looked at the map of 2011 voter patterns I posed above and compared it to this population density map: http://img110.imageshack.us/img110/7076/torontodensity3dw1.gif

And honestly, it looks like all three parties have something to celebrate.

The NDP is happy that Jack Layton would have delivered 3 NDP ridings instead of just 1. They believe Trinity-Spadina is safe. And they're counting on doing as well as they did in 2011, giving them Toronto Center (now that it has no Rosedale, and soon no Bob rae), AND University-Rosedale (since Rosedale's red-blue is outnumbered by the University orange).

The Liberals are happy because they think Trudeau will make them competitive on the University side of University-Rosedale, and that they'll be able to hang onto Toronto Center even without Rae or Rosedale to help. They believe they'll turn 1 Liberal riding into 2.

And the Conservatives are happy that the NDP and Liberals will waste resources on competitive races in downtown Toronto, while they shore up Conservative candidates in the burbs and the West.

Basically, everyone likes war.

Though if it's of any consolation, the dynamic might be such that the Tories and Liberals will split the right and allow the NDP up the middle, in both Rosedale and the waterfront condos...

So what do you guys think the net effect will be in seat distribution for Ontario and Quebec as a whole. How many seats switch hands and how many of the new seats go to each party?

theleftyinvestor wrote:

From reading through the commission's report, I don't get the sense that University-Rosedale was a solution that any of the presenters had put forward. It seems that they took into account the criticisms of their initial proposal, and then arbitrarily decided on a split to accommodate them.

The flaw in the commission process is the lack of recursion... when the initial proposal is flawed enough that it requires implementation of new ideas that were not seen in either of the original boundaries nor the proposal, it is possible to end up with a final "solution" that is not widely favoured, too late in the process to do anything about it. 

Anyway I can't think of anything much better either.

That must be what happened.  I attended the hearings at Metro Hall and if one excluded the "rep by pop" advocacy people (who said GTA ridings should be smaller so immigrant and racialized communities weren't diliuted) I'd say about 50% of all deputations came from Annex NIMBYs who didn't want to be in St. Paul's.  The solution was simple: take out the condos and make a condo riding instead.   But these were appeals based on emotion not evidence.  It is just not possible to simply draw a line along Queen St. and create a new riding below it.  

So they had to stretch up to Dundas, which is a terrible boundary.   

The Mount Pleasant riding made far more sense, all that was needed was some minor tweaking.  Why should Yonge and St. Clair be in a different riding from Rosedale?  There's a great deal of "communuity of interest" between then northern part of the present TC and eastern half of St. Paul's.  And the Annex has enough in common socioeconomically to go into St. Paul's.  

Blunt Objects provides an anaysis of the new Montreal area ridings:

http://blunt-objects.blogspot.ca/

As far as I can tell: NDP loses the NDG- Lachine seat which is carved up beyond recognition. It gains a new seat in Ville Marie and therefore maintains the same number of seats as before. This compares with the present map in effect in the last election. The Liberals are also strengthened in Westmount which had been very close for them. The NDP gains at least two new seats in the suburbs.

Comparing the new map with the origial proposal: Montreal itself loses the one new seat it got under the initial proposal, now shifted back to eastern Quebec which originally was to lose one seat.

The proposed Maurice Richard, which wd have been an NDP gain is wiped out and largely submerged into the new Ahuntsic. The Liberals gain this seat because boundaries are shifted to the west. St Leonard which wd have gone NDP reverts to its current shape and Liberal lead.

One good development is that the Commission abandoned riding names of famous (or not) people and reverted back to geographical names which is much less confusing.

Stockholm wrote:

I think the new University-Rosedale" riding could be won by the NDP with the right candidate. The new Toronto Centre is tailor made to be an NDP riding.

So is the current Toronto Centre. However, I would argue that the NDP has a better chance of winning the current Toronto Centre than they do the new Rosedale-University, paricularly if Olivia Chow reitires. And of course, provincially, the new map is a disaster for Rosario Marchese who, incredibly, also lobbied against the previous map and for a "condo riding". 

The previous draft was much better for the NDP. By bowing to the wishes of Annex NDPers the TS NDP have committed a major tactical error by lobbying for the "condo riding". We've gone from a situation where the map would have had a Liberal-leaning Mout Pleasant and NDP leaning Toronto Centre and Trinity-Spadina (NDP advantage 2:1) to one where the Liberal leaning St. Paul's is retained and we now also have a Liberal leaning University-Rosedale, a Liberal leaning Spadina-Fort York and an NDP leading Toronto Centre (Liberal advantage 3:1).

That this bizarre map that lumps together Kensington Market with Rosedale rather than recognising Bloor Street as a natural socio-economic divide is the result not of some Tory-Liberal connving but TS NDP lobbying just shows the dangers of a) being too clever for your own good and b) getting what you wish for. 

And to think this is all because well to do Annex NDPers didn't like the original proposal and preferred to roll the dice in the hope that they could continue to be in an NDP riding. Just an example of how, even in the NDP, class gives you clout. 

Stockholm wrote:

I have not done the calculations (I'm sure someone will) but I'm 99% certain that the NDP would have very easily won "Spadina-Fort York" if the 2011 election had been fought on these boundaries. I think that the NDP would also have won "University-Rosedale" - even though the NDP barely campaigned at all in the Rosedale part of TC last time. The new Toronto Centre is probably demographically the most NDP friendly of the three but I suspect NDP support there would look lower based on 2011 because the NDP campaign in Toronto Centre was quite weak. If these boundaries are final - you can be sure that in 2015 the NDP would put all three of these seats at the top of the "A list" of ridings to target would run very high profile well-resourced candidates.

It would be interesting if someone can do an analysis of what the notional results would have been in the last election in the 4 ridings in question under both the earlier proposal for new riding boundaries and the current proposal.