Everybody's Wrong But Me

This is a comment sent to the Electoral Boundaries Comission a few days ago.

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I was absolutely impressed by the report made by the Electoral Boundaries Commission in August of this year.  When I saw the Preliminary Report, my reaction was (and my wife is a witness) “Oh my God! It’s like they followed all my recommendations”.  So I’d like to congratulate the Commission and everyone who works there for a remarkable work.

You can imagine my deception when the Premier, following discontent mostly in the North of the province, decided to increase the number of MLAs from 81 to 89.  I personally don’t see the difference in having 7 MLAs out of 81 or having 8 out of 89!  But that is another issue and is not the point of this submission.

My focus is mainly on the STV maps and boundaries, for which I have more of an interest and which I think needs to “make geographic sense”; a very vague concept I admit.  I want to come back to the Preliminary Report made this August, which I found near perfect.  It’s difficult to put Boundaries inside Vancouver or Surrey for example and the decision by the Commission looks appropriate to me.  Major Regions of BC are separated and I don’t see any STV district that, in my opinion, is located in 2 regions.  In total, looking at both STV and SMP maps, I saw only 3 minor problems.  In order of importance:

1. Downtown Kelowna.  Most of downtown Kelowna is part of the Okanagan-Boundary STV district and is completely surrounded by Okanagan-Shuswap STV district.  Kelowna, as a whole, needs, in my opinion, to be part of the same STV district and not be divided.

2. North.  There is a strip north of the Northwest STV district that is part of the Northeast STV district.  In my humble opinion, that strip needs to be part of Northwest STV district.

3. North Shore.  The North Shore STV district needs a name that reflects that it also includes Squamish, Whistler and Pemberton.  I think it should be name something like “North Shore – Sea to Sky”; or something similar.

That being said, I hope that the Premier’s new “instructions” will not force you to start completely from scratch because you have done, in my opinion, a wonderful job.

Thank you,
Frédéric Van Caenegem

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 00:17 and is filed under British Columbia, Issues & politics.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.