Currently all of the Comox Valley is part of the Vancouver Island North riding, With the changes to electoral boundaries in BC because of the six new federal seats Vancouver Island was destined to get one and all of our electoral boundaries were likely to be changed a lot. I had expected them to stick with their initial proposal in this area as I was certain my more radical suggestion of making all the natural resource extraction areas on the Island one riding was not going to fly.
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| Hard to see, but the original proposal was for a line down the middle of the Comox Valley |
Initially the Commission proposed a line running down the valley following what was the Island Highway in the past. While I did not think it was smart to split the Comox Valley, this division made some sense if you were going to do it.
They have now released their final report and they decided to use the municipal borders of Courtney. For the life of me I can not understand why they would use those boundaries because Courtney has some of the more irrational local government boundaries on the Island. Courtney has an exclave - an area of the town that is not physically connected to the rest of the town.
In the case of Courtney they decided to use municipal boundaries, but when it comes to the largest municipality on the island, Saanich, they happily carved it up it three ridings with little of no consideration of any rational geographic reasons.
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| Proposed boundary between Courtney-Alberni and Vancouver Island North-Comox-Powell River |
Canada will now have a riding with an exclave.
3 comments:
The highway served as no better a boundary than the political city boundary. The residents across the highway are as much community as those across a street. Larger populations will get split somewhere, whether Prince George but not Kamloops, or the Comox Valley but not Nanaimo or Victoria.
Not sure why there were so keen to follow municipal borders exactly here when in other cities it did not matter, (Burnaby, Saanich, Kelowna, etc).
Although drawing electoral divisions is very challenging with our geography, I am, overall, not as happy with this final report compared the last redistribution (2006).
Would you or any one else be willing to create your own version of the BC electoral map?
When municipal boundaries make for clear geographic, economic or social divisions it makes sense to follow them. It also makes sense that if a municipality has a population between 93,000 and 118,000 that it should have an MP to themselves and not be split up.
The boundary in the Comox valley does not make any sense at all to me because I think the municipal boundaries of Courtney should never have bee allowed.
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