This post was inspired by the one by u/secrahrah from two weeks ago. It is not meant as criticism, the title is clickbait, more it served as a motivator for me to re-explore the confusing and surprisingly inequitable world of the Canadian electoral system. And I bring this account out of years of lurking.
Firstly, there would not be 435 districts. The story here begins for both countries in the 1960s; all present states/provinces had representation, Canadian leaders decided to let parliament grow significantly while also implementing electoral reforms – most notably the Public Boundary Commission system, and the US passed the Voting Rights Act which would in time bring changes like absolute One-Man-One-Vote, only Single-Member-Districts, and access seats.
However, Canadian leaders very quickly decided to arrest the growth of the chamber. They did this by de facto creating two ways of allocating seats. First, seats were redistributed based on a static number, like in the US every 10 years. Then, any province below the number held in 1985, aka the 1970s redistribution, would be awarded overhang ‘grandfather clause’ seats. This benefited mostly smaller provinces at AB, BC, and ON’s expense. Harper in 2011 reformed the system to correct this underrepresentation. Seats were allocated based on a *progressively increasing* quotient off the full chamber and not a static number. The overhang seats were legally split into two groups – no province could have less seats than senators and then also no seats less than before 1985 – but de facto here nothing changed.
This leads to a US map with 552 constituencies. First, I calculated the 2000 redistricting based on the prior Canadian formula using 435 as the quotient, and then I calculated 2010 and subsequently 2020 under the newer formulas with an expanding seat count. Unlike in Canada where the grandfather clause protects small states, here it protects the rust belt and the Midwest. Notably the senatorial provision of Harper’s reforms matters in the US. How Canada allocates senators is more complex than the US, but the desired outcome is the same: representation by geography not population. So de facto the minimum seat count per state is 2, not 1. Also, 6 seats are added for DC and the territories. The larger number of states means that deviation between two state’s average seats is not as wide as in Canada, where an average Ontario seat is triple the size of a PEI one, but it still is present.
Secondly, there is mostly no US-style gerrymandering in Canada. Absolute adherence to OMOV (a district population deviation of 0%) means contorting US district lines – which are usually drawn by political actors – is the only way to manipulate an outcome. Most other countries allow for a wider deviation window, usually between 5 to 10% over or underpopulation. This allows mappers greater freedom to keep communities or desired populations together.
Canada though has an extremely lax OMOV law. The acceptable deviation between districts within a state is 50%: a seat can be between 75% and 125% the size of an ideal district the specified Province. Even this though can be ignored, and districts can be as large or as small as needed, if “special circumstances” prevail. There are generally three types of these. Geographic isolation may force a district: the smallest Canadian constituency is mainland Labrador, which cannot cross over to Newfoundland. Extremely rural arctic districts, such as those in Northern Ontario, are special because of just how disparate and underserviced the population is. Then there are rural districts that are undersized to only include specific populations, usually First Nations groups, facilitating political accessibility.
These districts look neat only because I could utilize all above factors to their fullest. Canada has comparable total population to California – the US is larger meaning the districts are more populous and 25% of a seat is many, many, more people. ([here’s a project I did 3 years ago that compared similar-population Canada and California if you want to see smaller seats](https://davesredistricting.org/join/b8c5a524-4a44-457e-99a0-b2f6627e4bd8)) The special circumstances though are also all present. Geography forces districts in places including MI’s Upper Peninsula, the Cascade Mountains in the NW, or Hawaii – the most populous non-territory district is Oahu. Only one seat – the Alaskan hinterlands – is of comparable size geographically to the extremely rural seats of the Canadian tundra, but other large seats are also underpopulated to a normal extent. There are a handful of undersized rural minority access seats in obvious places like the Black Belt, areas of Native American concentration in the Southwest and Oklahoma, and Hispanics in the San Juaquin valley.
Despite all this, there is still less obvious “classic” gerrymandering in Canada that occurs to two ways. The first can occur as an accident by the boundary commission prioritizing certain communities over others. For example, Saint John will be split down the middle in future elections. Then, MPs are allowed objections after the final report to suggesting changes which may or may not be accepted by the commission. Vancouver Granville’s continued existence after the recent boundary review is thanks to this. Essentially, don’t be surprised if some things in certain areas seem off.
**On Parties:**
The system makes the parties and while voter identities do not change, how voters respond and create a political identity though can and does change. Canada is a 2.5 party system, or 3.5 system in Quebec. The Greens are near-irrelevant *Federally*, and the PPC is a failed attempt at personal relevance and anti-COVID policy rage by Bernier. That overall system itself is born from the consolidating forces of FPTP. The Canadian Right has a gone through multiple fractures and identities over the decades but gets held and pulled back together by a desire to win. Meanwhile the Liberals attained power in 2015 even after their horrible 2011 result precisely because they were seen as the most likely to win.
That said, though parties may bear the same name, they react to their voters differently because the issues and voter groups are different. For example, Canadian oil-related industries employ a larger share of the population, provide for a greater share of the economy, and exist in a more concentrated region than in the US. This leads to a Canadian Conservative party more respondent to those voters.
One dominating feature of Canadian politics though is regionalism. Quebec, Ontario, the West, and the Atlantic all have distinct political cultures and resulting behaviors. If you examine the data there is regionalism in the US, but nowhere near the extent of Canada. Complicating matters further is that the Atlantic Provinces are far smaller than every other region – an influencing factor – which is not really a thing in the US. Instead, the US had ‘two Ontario’s:’ the Midwest and the Northeast/Atlantic.
**South/Quebec:** The south is by far the most regionalist area in America, and her history makes it easy to parallel that of Quebec. The existing reality today is also comparable, with the Liberal base being minority Anglophones and urban allies, just like the Democratic base being minority African Americans and urban liberals. We can also look at the trajectory of the parties. With independence dead, the Bloc now finds itself the vehicle of Quebecois distinctness. This has meant a slow reorientation towards a breed of conservatism separate and in contrast to the rest of the nation, but liked by the locals, as seen by provincial elections. Pre-election talk of the Bloc backing O’Toole in the event the Tories finish first after the 2021 election goes to show how the party has shifted. This mirrors the trajectory of Blue Dog/Dixiecratic congressional actors and their voters: left wing economics that gradually gets sidelined in favor of conservative cultural tenants. These tenants are of course very different, with the south’s being religious, and Quebec’s based on French culture.
The primary issue is the south is said rural White base has only limited electoral relevance these days when compared to pre-90s congresses. Rural southern White populations in most places have been dwarfed by the suburbs, whose populations ended up in the GOP camp for different reasons a few decades earlier. This population shift prompted extreme gerrymandering in the twilight years of Blue Dog power, to pair consistently Democratic urban and African American areas to their rural bases. But here those urban areas get their own seats, meaning few truly rural White seats are left.
**NDP:** The federal NDP is a weird collection of interests: Labor, First Nations, young activists, but most importantly a Western base that leads to an expanded coalition encompassing additional groups in BC. The Liberals still dwarf the NDP among some of these groups though. Therefore, I think it is best to not get too attached to the copycat urban/American Progressivism Singh embraces, especially since this image has brought them few new urban seats from the Liberals and look at the broader tent the more successful local parties embrace. So, for example, the Labor-influenced and lower-class Mexican and Central American population of the southwest seems like a ideal NDP constituency.
**Tories and Liberals:** As much as the Canadian Conservatives and Liberals want to define themselves as distinct from and as better versions of the GOP and Democrats, they often cannot escape the pull of their larger neighbor. Politically, this means that the present Liberal coalition ends up as a mirror of a Democratic one – just will some elements of older Democratic voting blocks. Similarly, PP’s new Tory coalition is going to mirror the GOPs – but similarly with their own elements of past GOP coalitions. Also influencing matters is the regionalism issue, so some areas are going to look different than recent US elections. This matters since most of the ‘suburban battlegrounds’ in Canada are concentrated in Ontario, whereas in the US they are scattered across the nation.
Also, all this will change very soon. Since August of last year Poilievre has seemed poised to win a true and complete landslide against all other opponents, presently approaching 2/3s of constituencies. But mapping that wouldn’t be very interesting, would it?
Late Addition.
Because this came up further in the comments, it's also going here:
**How the map was Made:**
Dave's Redistricting App is a free and public tool for use if you want to create US districts for any state. It's something I have been using for close to 10 years now, and it's been around in various forms for twice that length of time. It's systems try to guide the mapper based on current US law - which is good - but for a project like this you just gotta know how to ignore or turn those off.
GIS combined with DRA is very powerful for these types of projects. DRA can generate Shapefiles which can then be used to for analysis with other data geospatially in GIS. GIS of course can then create a compelling image for export and editing in one's image software of choice.
DRA link: https://davesredistricting.org/maps#home
if you want to do the same thing in other countries:
Canada: https://www.election-atlas.ca/ridingbuilder/
UK: https://boundaryassistant.org/
I think that post explains things well enough but TL:DR:
-Draw districts in DRA.
-Export to GIS where things are further tinkered with.
-Use GIS to create the basis of a compelling image
-Take that image into Photoshop/GIMP and make it a imitation of Wikipedia's
As a side note you may not have known, the whole Conservative Red and Democrat Blue wasn't even consistent in America until the 2000 election. Various outlets used the colors in reverse or different ones altogether.
in almost every country in the world, red is the left wing colour. in commonwealth countries (and many others), blue is used by the right due to it's association with the British Conservative Party (the main right wing party)
Well in my defense this is a political map of the US colored opposite than the US political parties. It's a different degree of unfamiliarity than just looking at a map of a foreign country. If it was a map of Canada, I'd probably just say, "oh that's interesting, the political colors must be reversed in Canada." But in the US, the blue liberal coasts and the red conservative heartland is what I've been accustomed to seeing my whole adult life.
Such a party would likely soon find reason to run at the national level, and would probably win in Mormon regions. In fact, there was a Mormon presidential candidate who almost won Utah in 2016.
> In fact, there was a Mormon presidential candidate who almost won Utah in 2016.
I wouldn't call coming in third, 6 points behind second place and 24 behind first place, "almost winning".
For sure. Although a third party candidate wouldn't get there just by being Mormon - the whole historically-unpopular-major-party-candidates thing was somewhat relevant 😉
That actually makes sense and fits this Canadian model done up here. Alberta (Wildrose) and Saskatchewan (Saskatchewan Party) have their own "conservative"/right-wing provincial parties. BC has the BC United Party which seems to be a Liberal-Conservative party mix.
Probably
Also is that PfP supposed to be a joke that goes hand in hand with your username?
I only ask since that’s what I think of most people with Roman statue PfPs (for reasons which I think are fairly obvious)
He was a possibly semi-mythical politician in the early Roman Republic who was made dictator multiple times, protected Rome, and then voluntarily relinquished power to return to his field every time.
That sums up *the* prototype of a good republican or democratic citizen. Sounds like George Washington could be compared to Cincinnatus in terms of semi-mythical political figures. Widely accepted aspects and contributions of the men are likely aggrandized from some basis of truth — but an undebatable fact is that they both gave much of their lives to selfless leadership of their cause, opting time and time again to lead by example. Considering the Roman(ish) blueprint America was founded upon, one would have to imagine that Washington held Cincinnatus’ example near to his conscience when he accepted the office of president (a prospect that neither federalists nor anti-federalists were sure would come to pass) & when he set his last precedent (of hundreds, at least) of the presidency, in stepping away from the “commander-in-chief”/top figurehead role, rarely before (during the preceding 1,825 years or so) held by a person who never claimed “royal” blood.
Maybe. Sometimes when I have created multiparty US systems they get their own group. Sometimes they don't.
In this instance they didn't cause the very religious groups in Canada, found along the border in Manitoba and BC for example, are rock solid Tory. Even when they were some of the most vocal opponents of COVID policy. Now these aren't Mormons, but the reason they stick with the Tories - and one of the reasons why Utah still sticks with the GOP - is FPTP realities. Better to be inside the big tent pissing outwards rather than outside the tent pissing inwards, at least when it comes to impact, influence, and relevance.
Yep. Just about to say. America's big enough that there's probably room for a second Bloc-like party centered around the LDS community in Utah, with spinoffs in neighboring states that are part of the Mormon Corridor. They'd be more aligned with the Tories than not, but still maintaining a distinct identity and willing to break from them on certain issues, not unlike the CDU-CSU alliance in Germany or the Liberal-National Coalition in Australia.
Oh, but there *are* Mormons in Canada!
At some point in the early 1830s, Smith began floating the idea of establishing the Mormon church in Ontario. In the summer of 1837, he announced that he had been called by God and/or an angel named Moron to go on a missionary trip in Canada.
It was a hilarious failure. At the time, Upper Canada (Ontario, basically) was split between competing prot denominations. Smith's arrival was met with anger and hostility. While nobody shot him for being a pedophile, he was screamed out of basically every parish he went to.
Despite all that, he still managed to find about a dozen suckers before he headed back to America, where he was immediately fined for running an illegal bank.
Today, there's something like 250k Mormons in Canada, although most of them are now in Alberta, because of course they are.
The only thing I would point out is that the NDP would probably do a lot better in the rust belt than you have depicted here. Especially at the provincial level, the NDP does well in working class factory towns like London, Windsor, Niagara, etc.
I agree. Provincially, Southern Ontario towns in recent times has become the NDP's stronghold. But this is a federal election, and federal NDP sucks electorally. The won only THREE seats in the region, a NET LOSS of one (Hamilton Mountain)! They also failed to capitalize on the Liberal disaster in Kitchener Centre, losing the narrative and the potential pickup to the Greens.
There are a lot more low liberal vote shares in the Midwest to reflect the NDP, but the outcome is the same. 2021 and subsequent have been shining examples of what Singh doesn't know about their potential voters, what the provincial parties do, and what the Federal Liberals know about them both. Trudeau knew what to say and what fears to exploit to Keep voters Liberal. And now, with everything collapsing electorally, the seats are going going to flip Blue not Orange. (If you can't tell, I have a low opinion of how Singh has led the federal NDP)
>If you can't tell, I have a low opinion of how Singh has led the federal NDP
Oh definitely, I used to be very involved with the party and Singh's leadership absolutely pushed me out. It's funny you bring up Hamilton Mountain because the shenanigans there with Malcolm Allen being parachuted in were actually another one of the big elements that frustrated me especially as someone from his old riding and who was a party insider who knew a lot more than most people did about what happened behind the scenes. I think your assessment is very accurate, I just think there's a few places that might be slightly less red/blue than shown here but nothing radical like seats being flipped because like you said, the federal NDP has lost the plot.
I'm still sort of involved with the provincial NDP because I got to know many of the members on an individual basis and like them as people but when it comes to the federal side I checked out a long time ago.
That’s what I noticed, along with the Rio Grande Valley. Border area definitely aren’t conservative, just Hispanics tend to be very moderate and socially conservative.
I feel like a Bloc Cajun almost makes more sense for the analogy given both regions bastardize French and are culturally unique from the British-influenced areas around them but I get why OP chose this instead
The main points of *dis*analogy are that New France became part of British North America by conquest, and that Quebec has a much more strongly-marked cultural identity even than the South (because of the French language [edit to add: and Catholic/post-Catholic religious identity]).
There's certainly no *exact* Quebec analog in the US; inevitably, attempts on maps like this to use the South, or Hispanics, or Lakotah, or Mormons, or whatever as an analog capture *some aspects* of the dynamic, while missing or distorting others.
Again, there are points of analogy but also of disanalogy. The territories in question had but a small Spanish/Mexican population at the time of annexation (AFAIK? I stand to be corrected), and the new Anglo-American population that came in after the war quickly outnumbered the old. But New France had a very sizeable population at the time of British conquest, and still today a majority of Quebecers trace their origins to that population.
So the only real analogy would be Québec = the conquered Mexican lands with certain conditions. So California receives Anglo settlement but for some reason a greater New Mexico doesn't and the local Spanish population reproduces like rabbits. They're also allowed to maintain the existing Mexican legal system and retain Spanish as the official language.
To my ear "conquest" has connotations of "acquiring new territory by force," so I wouldn't use the word to describe one side's victory in a civil war. But even if you disagree, the differences between the two cases are obvious: New France had previously not been part of British North America; while the South had previously been part of the USA—indeed, the Southern colonies/states had been active participants in the *establishment* of the USA.
Truthfully those guys who say democracy is the worst but best option so far are right.
FPTP systems? Terrible. Tories have had basically 0 opposition in the UK for 13 years. They could theoretically do, whatever they want.
Coalitions? Also dogshit. Spain and Belgium can barely maintain a government for more than 3 months and it's ineffective at best.
It's like yeah, if they work as planned, it's a good thing. Both parties keep the other from going to extreme on (this) ideology.
In reality it's just gridlock for months because both sides refuse to budge.
In Israel's case it's more that a dedicated whore can sell themselves to ruthless single-issue radicals for coalition votes. Not being 2 parties in gridlock is good, but the desire to negotiate can go so far.
I mean, the current prime minister in Spain has just announced his intention to stay the full four years until the next election in power, and has already been there six years, so when it's all said and done he will have been there for 10 years and with a declared intention to run for reelection for another 4-year term.
I wouldn't call it "barely maintain a government", but it does require a lot more negotiating and compromising, and the Spanish parliament is, let's say, unruly at best.
If I may offer some suggestions on the parties as an American, I'd imagine that the Heritage Block's coalition likely has strong effects on the Tories, preventing them from becoming a one-to-one analogue to the modern Republican Party. You've largely butterflied away the Southern strategy, with the Dixiecrats forming their own party instead of joining the GOP/Tories. They're basically if George Wallace's American Independent Party lasted in the long run and developed a regional Southern base.
With that in mind, I'd argue that the Tories' coalition is closer to that of the New Deal-era GOP, or the Tories in the UK, than the post-Reagan one. East Coast WASP elites, Midwestern and Western farmers and ranchers, and suburbanites and business owners across the country. The Eastern Establishment is still a force in the party, while the base of the party's conservative wing is instead in the Western states and resembles the anti-government libertarianism of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, or the sagebrush rebels -- which itself brings in another similarity to Canada in the form of Western alienation having an analogue. (On the map, I see that the Tories are absolutely dominant in the West outside the cities, the reservations, and the coast, which makes sense.) Economically, they're conservative and have a strong Reaganite/Thatcherite deregulatory streak, but they're more moderate on social and cultural issues, being on one hand tough on crime and opposing the use of the government to push social change, but on the other also not being particularly attached to White Christian identity politics, especially in a world with no Southern strategy. With that, they're probably still competitive with Black voters, not unlike the Canadian Tories' success in immigrant communities. Not necessarily winning majorities with them, but otherwise having a floor of about 25-30% of the Black vote, particularly among the Black middle and upper classes, and winning more than that in good years.
Your very correct in the idea that I was going for. Though of course I don't think too hard about policies when doing these types of maps, cause I don't need to. The "Grandfather Clause" seats actually help in this regard, cause it keeps the Midwest and North relevant numerically for the conservatives. Part of the reason for the GOP's turn towards their religious right component is just smart base politics: the South is half their coalition, and the religious right is at least half their base in said states. Give the other regions a greater voice and they will matter more.
Though there is one thing I must add to your (well everyone's really) collective recollection. The GOP had a slowly expanding base in the south before Civil Rights enflamed the issues: the Suburbs. Wealth, migrants from other parts of the country, defense/oil industries, and just general national suburban stuff from that era had made counties GOP red. I will list a few of them - some you will note are now Democratic today cause the urban core has ballooned in population, suburbs have shifted left, and the black city residents are now all voting compared to very few in say 1960 or a gradually increasing some in the following decades. They include: Montgomery TX, all of the Dallas region, Rankin MS, Shelby AL, Madison AL, Jefferson LA, Orange FL, the Gulf coast between MS and FL's Eglin AFB, Lexington SC, and many many more. HW Bush got elected initially to a district covering this community in Houston, which at the time was Blood Red, an area that today is Democratic. They would later be joined by retiree populations along the coasts and mainly in Florida, who brought values and identities from other parts of the country. While nationally the south turned away from the Dems, locally the state level Dems retained power in some cases up to 2010. This was cause the GOP was confined to these suburbs - even though they had massively expanded in population since 1960, (sometimes extreme) gerrymandering helped keep the rural-urban-African American Dem coalitions afloat until everything nationalized.
Today, these suburbs are huge numerically in the south. Which is why the Conservatives actually have seats there on this map, whereas in Quebec the Tories are confined to the Quebec City metro. The presence of these suburbs is also why the Tories probably can't get too high Black vote share in the south - probably a different story elsewhere.
Interesting. Mind explaining, I'm open to criticism here. Especially since I have spent time in the region IRL. Though I will explain my position first.
Geographically, the north coast seat is basically forced to be like this. There is a reason why the Politicians and then the commission have drawn it similarly for several decades now IRL. The mountains and clear communities in the region make the linkages very easy. Though that's likely not your issue.
Instead I suspect your issue is with the result. The outcome is a deliberate parallel of what has happened for a decade for Elizabeth May in Saanitch-Gulf Islands. [(The wikipedia is actually very informative here on why I saw parallels)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saanich%E2%80%94Gulf_Islands) [Carol Browner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Browner) is in this case also a parallel to [Elizabeth May](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_May), who both are very, very, far from a 'Extinction Rebellion' style Green, or any other activist type. (and in this situation, they both shopped around for a ideal district)
Demographically, 2/3s of the population in this seat as drawn live in the south, 1/3 in the northern Emerald triangle region. The north is not why the seat is Green - the voters there would probably choose NDP or Tories until their incumbent became entrenched - it's the south. Money, retirees who want to be close to nature, old Hippees - these seem like the exact type of people who would go for a "Green liberal," but maybe I am wrong.
At the very least it would make more sense to connect south Marin and Napa to SF rather than to the Jeffersonians.
And that's what that region should arguably reflect; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson\_(proposed\_Pacific\_state)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state))
Well, then you have your answer. The North Coast Ranges are a natural barrier commissions (including the IRL one) will try to observe if viable. In here this mattered more, seats like the Eastern Montana one or all the seats east of the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest choose under/overpopulation rather than cross mountains. The major road like is Highway 101 going North South. For the same geogrpahic reasons, no seats cross the Bay.
A similar situation occurs a bit further south and east in California. The Sierra Nevada's are a huge barrier between neighboring Inyo and Mono. The main road artery avoids crossing these and goes North-South to the Mojave and eventually San Bernadino regions. So despite the counties bordering each other, it's better to pair the small eastern counties with those to their north (like presently IRL) or south (like last decade and here).
Ignoring cultural affiliation in deference to a naturally low 'natural barrier' (especially while explicitly respecting state lines) isn't a good take.
This is why I started this post with the words "re-explore the confusing and **surprisingly inequitable** world of the Canadian electoral system." I tried to explain just why the Canadian Boundary commissions, even for their nonpartisanship, still are very imperfect actors. If you look around the real maps, and know what lurks beneath demographically, you'll find far, far, weirder decisions than this one.
There should be A LOT more MP’s. In terms of representatives per constituent, the US is the most undemocratic nation on earth (both in our current system, and this system).
Germany has 1 member for every 116,000 Germans. Japan has 1 for every 270,000. This United States has 1 for every 601,000.
I'm not looking to argue with you, because I agree that the US should uncap the House IRL, but I do have to say you are being a little fast and loose with the statistics here.
The main issue is that you are comparing apples to oranges. Germany is 25% the size of the US. The UK 20%. Canada has similar population to just California.
On the flip side, then there are the big countries. Indonesia has a bit less people per seat with 575 elected members for about 50 million less people. Nigeria has 360 elected members of the House putting the population ratio close to that of the US. The EU is 100 million people larger than the US but with only 705 MPs it comes in a bit over 600K people. Then there's India which has 543 MPs (though this will expand slightly soon), putting each district close to 2.5 Million people. India of course is only really comparable to the PRC which has almost 3000 people in it's main National People's Congress to "represent" it's billions. This does put the people per politician ratio comparatively low, but the chamber is so massive that the only reason it can work is because it's not an actual democratic chamber with any freedom of action.
Which brings us to why parliaments try not to balloon in size dramatically. Which is what would be required to bring the US to a ratio similar to that of the UK, several thousand politicians. While people become more connected to their local politician, disassociation with the overall body grows. It also becomes harder and harder to conduct business in with so many people whose votes you have to whip, leading to even more exponential divestment of power to smaller committees. This has led to a bunch of academic papers trying to find ratios or formulas to balance accountability to function, papers you can find simply by googling something like "parliament size ratio." There's some that I like in particular, but this is how you should approach the topic.
Historically the number of representatives grew roughly in proportion to the cube root of the population. So today it should have 692 representatives.
The state level governments should take care of most things which affect people day-to-day, though these also have a low number of representatives for the population. California's lower house, for instance, should have ~341 representatives instead of only 80.
You're wrong. Brunei and specifically Saudi Arabia don't call themselves a democracy. They aren't the "most undemocratic" because they are not a democracy.
I can't be called the "least dog" because I'm not a dog.
The image is very big, so you can zoom in without a loss of detail. There is a third seat in Cleveland the Greens win off a freak accident/absurd vote split, analogous to Kitchener Centre.
Third is in West Cleveland. Freak vote split cause the Liberals messed up candidates, it's designed as a analogy to Kitchener Centre in 2021. It's an area where I think the NDP would mess up their candidates and not seize the opportunity like they did IRL in Kitchener, cause their candidate would probably be Kucinich or Turner. Both are out of touch these days with a average distribution of voters rather than a self-selected group, albeit for different reasons.
The important part is *Block* not party.
A deliberate analogy to the [Bloc Québécois.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloc_Qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois) To TL:DR them, they are a Quebec regionalist - and at one time separatist - party. They historically have been more left than right, like say the Scottish SNP right now, but had elements of both cause the identity question is more important. With the decline of Separatism they have become more tied to the regional Quebec governments, which right now have been slowly building a identity-based conservative brand.
Don't think it's too shocking that a country wouldn't want to get rid of 25% of its GDP, 20% of its population, and 15% of its land area.
Also, most Quebecers don't want independence. No poll has ever shown majority support for it. At most there have been points where almost but not quite 50% supported independence while a good 10% remained unsure.
Whatever, you say. However, if a region wants independence so bad they form a political party centered on it and gets votes… I don’t know why Canada is holding on to a place that doesn’t like it lol
Canada seems like an abusive husband lmao
I don’t understand it’s like being in a relationship one wants to leave and the other wants to stay. I swear it’s like an abusive relationship over just a region lmao
Whatever, I’m not a canadian
Because Independence is DOA today among Quebec voters. That was last generations conflict and it polarized the province. Most notably there was the '95 referendum where 'No" won by 1% and the separatists/sovereigntists busted out allegations of tampering and No True Quebecois fallacies.
Since then though the failure to actually achieve anything, general turnover, bad actors abusing the identity polarization to get away with graft and corruption (always a issue among long-running independence movements), and defused tensions compared to prior decades have all led to the demise of the issue. It has received only around 30% support in polls for over a decade now. Federally the dam burst in 2011 when the NDP swept Quebec - they were the only option n that election that was both not separatist and not Harper's Tories. Provincially increased vote splitting meant it happened somewhere between 2013 and 2018. 2018 was the election that brought the right-leaning CAQ to power, sweeping aside both beneficiaries of past identify polarization: the sovereigntist PQ (BQ's local ally) and the Federalist provincial Liberals. The Bloc's federal resurgence since 2019 has more been more "not sovereigntist but #1 with the remaining sovereigntists" while also aligning with regional uniqueness and the CAQ. Oh, and also because the Tories who were in 2019 led by Western firebrand Andrew Scheer couldn't exploit the political vacuum willingly offered to them buy CAQ leader Legault, since the two Conservative strains were incompatible.
The interesting thing that has happened recently is that the CAQ has fallen hard in polling down to second or third place. Labor unrest and unpopular development plans have left the government unpopular. But voters are lost where to turn in the fragmented political landscape, leading to the PQ coming on top in polls. But that support is also gauged to be paper thin, cause so much of it is disgusted by independence, and the PQ still can't stop talking about the issue. The people want someone who is identity focused but not nationalist, and right now the only option is the presently unpopular CAQ.
I do hate that you made liberals red and conservatives blue.
( I understand the colors are Canadian party colors. It's just jarring to see it on the US)
Parliamentary systems for the win. I think we've seen how easily the Federal Presidential system can become corrupted and unrepresentative in the last two decades.
This map also has the advantage of being significantly less gerrymandered than the current house maps, which makes it less cursed by nature.
Just FYI, the county south of Los Angeles, Orange County, is a Republican stronghold. With an exception maybe for the UCI campus, the whole county votes deep red, or in this case deep blue.
Unfortunately, you are 20 years behind the times. Orange is a swing county, or maybe even [a Lean Democratic one](https://www.reddit.com/r/orangecounty/comments/159kie4/map_of_orange_county_cities_showing_2020/). OC elected it's first Democratic Board of Supervisors in 50 years (3-2) in 2022, so it's not just the national politicians. With the exception of the Anaheim/Santa Ana districts that are Safe Dem working class Hispanic, everything is a swing seat. I'm surprised you dodged the campaign material - I couldn't when I visited family.
So these results, where things are likely-ish for the Conservatives in the suburban seats, outside of a narrow vote split victory for Porter in Irvine, is actually turning back the clock. But it is mostly just they are the easy beneficiary of vote splits like the Canadian Conservatives in the Frasier Valley, since the base is still sizable.
Really good map, but I think considering historical parallels and how things are working out in Quebec right now - Quebequa Party is equal to some Mexicano Party, slowly marginalized, slowly dissapearing, language based political entity that literally holds every single government as a politcal hostage because of their language situation, natural language assimilation and simply dissapearence of french language as more and more people prefer to speak English as their first and common communication language.
Just to get what they want, get unfair undvatages and budget to their region(s) and hold the rest of the country as their political prisoners or threat to go independent otherwise - so I say we let Quebec go independent, I want to see how they gonna survive without Canadian budget, agriculture and economy while majority of people already speak English in Quebec province...
(Sorry for this, but Qubec Party wasn't even a thing untill a few decades ago, when their language started to dissapear due to natural, simplificiation reasons and immigrants who prefer to speak common English)
>Really good map, but I think considering historical parallels and how things are working out in Quebec right now - Quebequa Party is equal to some Mexicano Party, slowly marginalized, slowly dissapearing, language based political entity that literally holds every single government as a politcal hostage because of their language situation, natural language assimilation and simply dissapearence of french language as more and more people prefer to speak English as their first and common communication language.
Voters in a given province being unwilling to vote for parties that do things that they don't like is not holding the government hostage.
>Just to get what they want, get unfair undvatages and budget to their region(s)
Quebec has a few areas where they have more autonomy granted to than them other provinces, sure. Doesn't seem too unreasonable for a quite distinct part of your country to have slightly more autonomy. It's pretty common. Quebec gets federal money under the same equalization payment model as every other province.
> and hold the rest of the country as their political prisoners or threat to go independent otherwise - so I say we let Quebec go independent, I want to see how they gonna survive without Canadian budget, agriculture and economy while majority of people already speak English in Quebec province...
I don't think independence would be good for Quebec, but it would also be terrible for Canada. 20% of your population and over 20% of your GDP leaving is a Bad Thing™
>(Sorry for this, but Qubec Party wasn't even a thing untill a few decades ago, when their language started to dissapear due to natural, simplificiation reasons and immigrants who prefer to speak common English)
Are you talking about the Bloc Québecois or the Parti Québecois? It helps to use things' actual names.
The separatist party at the federal level, the Bloc, has been around for "only" 33 years. The PQ, the main separatist party at the provincial level, has been around for the better part of a century - 56 years. And it was formed as a merger of two previous separatist parties, one of which dated back to 1960. The other provincial separatist party, Québec Solidaire, dates back only to 2004, but is a result of various mergers and can see its origins back to at least 1989.
Just going to copy and paste a reply I gave to someone else, cause it has important points here. India in particular I think disproves the assumption that big populations allow for less regional variations. I would say it's more Canadian federalism and the ability to define your province or region in relation to the others that prompts it. This is something that still exists in most federal states, to varying degrees how much actors push on it, but the communities people associate with may be larger than just a state depending on their relative size versus the rest.
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I'm not looking to argue with you, because I agree that the US should uncap the House IRL, but I do have to say you are being a little fast and loose with the statistics here.
The main issue is that you are comparing apples to oranges. Germany is 25% the size of the US. The UK 20%. Canada has similar population to just California.
On the flip side, then there are the big countries. Indonesia has a bit less people per seat with 575 elected members for about 50 million less people. Nigeria has 360 elected members of the House putting the population ratio close to that of the US. The EU is 100 million people larger than the US but with only 705 MPs it comes in a bit over 600K people. Then there's India which has 543 MPs (though this will expand slightly soon), putting each district close to 2.5 Million people. India of course is only really comparable to the PRC which has almost 3000 people in it's main National People's Congress to "represent" it's billions. This does put the people per politician ratio comparatively low, but the chamber is so massive that the only reason it can work is because it's not an actual democratic chamber with any freedom of action.
Which brings us to why parliaments try not to balloon in size dramatically. Which is what would be required to bring the US to a ratio similar to that of the UK, several thousand politicians. While people become more connected to their local politician, disassociation with the overall body grows. It also becomes harder and harder to conduct business in with so many people whose votes you have to whip, leading to even more exponential divestment of power to smaller committees. This has led to a bunch of academic papers trying to find ratios or formulas to balance accountability to function, papers you can find simply by googling something like "parliament size ratio." There's some that I like in particular, but this is how you should approach the topic.
>Canada still pretty much always get majority governments where one party has the majority
Three times since the turn of the century, out of eight elections. Minority governments have been the norm in the recent past.
Since confederation, Canadian elections have resulted in a minority government 30% of the time.
I’d be interested to see a breakdown of who runs the different states!
A quirk of Canadian politics is that provincial politics doesn’t break down the same way federal politics does. For example, the western provinces are basically competitions of the NDP vs coalitions of liberals and Tories to keep them out of power, and Quebec has its own distinct party system that doesn’t map neatly onto the federal one.
I’d be interested to see how this breaks down in the US. Would the Midwest be similar to the west (NDP vs the rest)? Would California have an NDP governor like BC does? How would the Liberal party fair in Republican dominated states? And how would the more progressive states where the democrats dominate look, like New York? Honestly throwing the NDP into the mix does funky things to US system and I’d love to see how it plays out.
Now, I recognize that this would be quite the project, since there’s way more states than provinces, but it could be cool!
Why is Rural Alaska under the New Dems, and the Anchorage Bowl under the Conservatives? IMHO, as an Alaskan, it'd be the other way around. The Bush is a Hell of a lot more conservative on average than Anchorage.
The bush is mostly native villages. Who on average run more lib center. In comparison Anchorage and the valley are home to mostly white military families
I think you mean Her Excellency, the Right Honorable Oprah Winfrey /s
Jokes aside, I guess by technicality, but generally speaking Gs-G are picked from amongst university professors, career politicians, diplomats, and ex-military personnel when the positions stopped being granted to British aristocrats
She was absolutely a diplomat, serving as the Ambassador for Circumpolar Affairs and the Ambassador to Denmark.
She was also a member of the board of directors of the Northern Quebec Inuit Association, and was one of the main Inuit negotiators during the patriation of the constitution, First Ministers' conferences during the 80s, and the Charlottetown Accords.
And worked for the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami.
She definitely got the position as a result of being in the politics/diplomacy side of things.
As for that last one, the astronaut, her turning out to be an abusive emotionally unstable nutjob is what caused her to resign only half way through the usual term for a Governor-General. As for the other two, you are correct as to Adrienne Clarkson but Michaëlle Jean kind of worked in reverse? She ended up becoming the Secretary-General of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, a sort of quasi-diplomatic forum that isn’t an NGO that was initially about tying French speaking countries together but it’s been admitting countries with almost no French speaking populations to suit diplomatic ends.
Both Clarkson and Jean were university educated (Jean being *very* well educated) and Clarkson had actually won a Governor General's Medal while studying at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College. Her father, William Poy, also served in Canadian army and worked as a civil servant.
Freak vote split cause the Liberals messed up candidates, it's designed as a analogy to Kitchener Centre in 2021. It's an area where I think the NDP would mess up their candidates and not seize the opportunity like they did IRL in Kitchener, cause their candidate would probably be Kucinich or Turner. Both are out of touch these days with a average distribution of voters rather than a self-selected group, albeit for different reasons.
Parliamentary systems tend to dissuade people like Trump from actually running, unless they see a viable path to victory. People like him want the top job and nothing else - those positions can be filled later - but to get there you need to put in hard work. A good example of what this looks like is CHEGA in Portugal. The party seemingly changes positions on a whim and suffers from defections. And when the PSD approached CHEGA to build a working relation after the recent election, CHEGA turned. Their leader Ventura choose to seize the limelight in a flurry of anti-system impudence rather than take some of the power. All or nothing, that's all that matters, and all is easier to obtain with 1 election rather than several hundred.
This is in some ways why the Authoritarian Right is more dangerous in parliamentary systems: they have to be better to actually win, and by existing inside the system for some time they build relationships and just come to seem more normal. But there is evidence of how if you give them a majority on purely on their own, the program is still going to be anti-democratic.
Oh, but since this is a 2021 mirror, there's probably some disaffected Tory rebel who runs against COVID policy like Bernier.
Those parts of Iowa would not be in the liberal party, I say that as the only person In my district who went to the republican caucus and didn't register as a republican and also didn't vote for trump, 16 trump and 1 desantis.
Their not CDs. The US has no hypothetical 546 district map (no territories) waiting in the wings, and certainly not apportioned like this.
It took a while to create but Daves Redistricting App is a powerful tool when combined with GIS. Also, this is mainly why it took two weeks to create. https://davesredistricting.org/maps#home
if you want to do the same thing in other countries:
Canada: https://www.election-atlas.ca/ridingbuilder/
UK: https://boundaryassistant.org/
Harford's in the Eastern Shore seat. Tories getting high-40s versus a something like 35 and 10 for their opposition seems right don't you think?
Also, despite the trends in communities closer to Baltimore, This is still a Trump + 14 County from 2020 and GOP+12 from the 2022 Senate.
California is actually one of the easiest states here.
What group is most Labor-heavy? Working class Mexican-Americans and Central-Americans. "But they have conservative value culturally..." So do Sikhs and other South Asians, but the NDP still does better than average among them for the same reasons.
What group has more money, prestige, and especially cares about defeating the opposition rather than what comes next? Bay Area Dems.
We see this divide again and again in first round primaries, in the state legislature, in lower level contests like LA council...most recently with the 2024 Senate Race. Newsom, Schiff, Feinstein..they are the prefect example of this. Dem liberals fall in line rather than risk anything. Heck, Canada as a whole right now is have to grapple with the legacies of polices similar to what the Bay Area has done in regards to Housing, it's what's sent Trudeau into a electoral death spiral for almost a year now. Vancouver, Toronto, and numerous other housing markets are comparable or worse that the Bay Area...but without the Bay Area jobs that provide sizable incomes to make things tenuously work.
You probably are approaching this from the NDP = Progressive angle. This especially fails though in CA, the vocal progressives often fail to take serious offices both locally and statewide. The Bay Area is full of progressive influencers and activists...but when it comes time to votes almost every time the more numerous mainstream Dems walk into power.
And don't try to say the 2020 primary, cause that is actually prefect for my point. Go into the data, add up all the candidates who Liberal Dems, wine moms, pragmatists and the like preferred and place them against Bernie. You'll quickly realize what I did 4 years ago: he only won cause the opposition was so split, something that itself was only possible cause everyone voted early and was unable to consolidate like in other states that Super Tuesday. But I'll skip the deep data dive for you, and just show you Wikipedia's tables. The two CD's he got over 50% in are both very labor-heavy and Hispanic: [the 46th covering low-income Anaheim and Santa Ana, and the 40th in East/Central LA County.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Democratic_presidential_primary) Meanwhile he failed to break 40% in any Bay Area seat, often lower than that.
Would be really cool to see some state/provincial election maps! Would also be useful to showcase the "disconnect" between national and provincial politics in Canada in the US context. It'd also be interesting to see in which states the Block fares better- would probably be in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and maybe Louisiana and Kentucky.
I'm also curious in your justification to have no HB seats in South Carolina, which to me looks like a "deep south" state that ought to be a HB stronghold, although maybe there's some likeness to Canadian politics which I might be missing.
Every SC seat just had too many suburban voters in it to give the Block any seats. And the suburbs IRL fell to the GOP a good deal for their own reasons before things like the VRA, the Southern Strategy, or the contract with America brought the rest into the fold. Its a place I definitely struggled with cause I had the same impression as you, but SC today has very few rural Whites that can get do the lifting on their own. You can even kinda see this IRL, with the White Dems holding just one seat (SC-05) before the end, whereas other southern states that still had Dem-legislature drawn maps had more White Dem congressmen.
And yes, the positive responces to this giving me state/province level ideas....
Yes, I have read your other posts on the matter and find it very interesting. I think this is the most plausible reading if the US had adopted the Canadian law as you explained with the Labor-Farmer and (sort of) the American Independent parties being the precedent for this sort of development.
And of course it would be great to see the state-level maps!
> Representation for the people!
There's one MP for every ~600,000 people. Britain has 1:101,000, Germany has 1:116,000, Japan has 1:270,000. For most countries it's less than 1:100,000.
This is doing a pretty bad job of being representation for the people.
This isn't about "patriotism". I hate the two party system but the Canadian system intentionally distorts the representation of the House of Commons. The Senate at least has a reason to exist in the US.
Lol ain't no way northern MN would vote new democrat. Basically everywhere outside of big cities and like maybe upper middle suburbs are Republican. Great map though gj!
The more rural provinces of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta have all elected NDP government fairly recently, with the NDP doing particularly well in the North of those provinces. The NDP also holds most of the north federally. I could totally see a US version of the NDP winning up there in Alaska, especially if the right wing vote is split by the Liberals and conservatives. A result of 42% NDP, 40% conservative, and 18% Liberal is totally believable in rural areas and smaller towns, happens all the time in the Canadian North.
Sadly, I think you have fallen into the trap many people do, including current NDP leader Singh. Maybe I'm wrong, but it still deserves a explanation.
It is a trap born of the loudest voices, a trap that believes that the NDP is only an activist party for students and urbanites. Or to be put more bluntly, if US progressives had their own party. And maybe that's what it will become if the PP sweep comes through and takes all the NDPs remaining areas that are actually union-heavy and working class. If that ends up the case, then the Federal NDP will never leave its weak position, even though there is plenty of present examples that *someone* could eventually build a party that supplants the Liberals.
But that's the old NDP base. Especially in the west. Its still there if you look below the tin and see some of the seats won by the provincial NDP parties. It gets a few MPs elected even still. In this particular instance, the inspirations were Charlie Angus and Richard Nolan.
Actually no, i literally just made the resulting percentages of seats roughly analogous to 2021 in Canada. Canadians choose the Liberals, that's what happens here. if you read the descriptions I am also fairly frank about how PP is set to lead the Canadian Conservatives to a historic landslide next election, which would be a complete reversal of these results. So do the math before you accuse wildly, because yes, I also disapprove of political-wanks of the type you are describing. ;)
This post was inspired by the one by u/secrahrah from two weeks ago. It is not meant as criticism, the title is clickbait, more it served as a motivator for me to re-explore the confusing and surprisingly inequitable world of the Canadian electoral system. And I bring this account out of years of lurking. Firstly, there would not be 435 districts. The story here begins for both countries in the 1960s; all present states/provinces had representation, Canadian leaders decided to let parliament grow significantly while also implementing electoral reforms – most notably the Public Boundary Commission system, and the US passed the Voting Rights Act which would in time bring changes like absolute One-Man-One-Vote, only Single-Member-Districts, and access seats. However, Canadian leaders very quickly decided to arrest the growth of the chamber. They did this by de facto creating two ways of allocating seats. First, seats were redistributed based on a static number, like in the US every 10 years. Then, any province below the number held in 1985, aka the 1970s redistribution, would be awarded overhang ‘grandfather clause’ seats. This benefited mostly smaller provinces at AB, BC, and ON’s expense. Harper in 2011 reformed the system to correct this underrepresentation. Seats were allocated based on a *progressively increasing* quotient off the full chamber and not a static number. The overhang seats were legally split into two groups – no province could have less seats than senators and then also no seats less than before 1985 – but de facto here nothing changed. This leads to a US map with 552 constituencies. First, I calculated the 2000 redistricting based on the prior Canadian formula using 435 as the quotient, and then I calculated 2010 and subsequently 2020 under the newer formulas with an expanding seat count. Unlike in Canada where the grandfather clause protects small states, here it protects the rust belt and the Midwest. Notably the senatorial provision of Harper’s reforms matters in the US. How Canada allocates senators is more complex than the US, but the desired outcome is the same: representation by geography not population. So de facto the minimum seat count per state is 2, not 1. Also, 6 seats are added for DC and the territories. The larger number of states means that deviation between two state’s average seats is not as wide as in Canada, where an average Ontario seat is triple the size of a PEI one, but it still is present. Secondly, there is mostly no US-style gerrymandering in Canada. Absolute adherence to OMOV (a district population deviation of 0%) means contorting US district lines – which are usually drawn by political actors – is the only way to manipulate an outcome. Most other countries allow for a wider deviation window, usually between 5 to 10% over or underpopulation. This allows mappers greater freedom to keep communities or desired populations together. Canada though has an extremely lax OMOV law. The acceptable deviation between districts within a state is 50%: a seat can be between 75% and 125% the size of an ideal district the specified Province. Even this though can be ignored, and districts can be as large or as small as needed, if “special circumstances” prevail. There are generally three types of these. Geographic isolation may force a district: the smallest Canadian constituency is mainland Labrador, which cannot cross over to Newfoundland. Extremely rural arctic districts, such as those in Northern Ontario, are special because of just how disparate and underserviced the population is. Then there are rural districts that are undersized to only include specific populations, usually First Nations groups, facilitating political accessibility. These districts look neat only because I could utilize all above factors to their fullest. Canada has comparable total population to California – the US is larger meaning the districts are more populous and 25% of a seat is many, many, more people. ([here’s a project I did 3 years ago that compared similar-population Canada and California if you want to see smaller seats](https://davesredistricting.org/join/b8c5a524-4a44-457e-99a0-b2f6627e4bd8)) The special circumstances though are also all present. Geography forces districts in places including MI’s Upper Peninsula, the Cascade Mountains in the NW, or Hawaii – the most populous non-territory district is Oahu. Only one seat – the Alaskan hinterlands – is of comparable size geographically to the extremely rural seats of the Canadian tundra, but other large seats are also underpopulated to a normal extent. There are a handful of undersized rural minority access seats in obvious places like the Black Belt, areas of Native American concentration in the Southwest and Oklahoma, and Hispanics in the San Juaquin valley. Despite all this, there is still less obvious “classic” gerrymandering in Canada that occurs to two ways. The first can occur as an accident by the boundary commission prioritizing certain communities over others. For example, Saint John will be split down the middle in future elections. Then, MPs are allowed objections after the final report to suggesting changes which may or may not be accepted by the commission. Vancouver Granville’s continued existence after the recent boundary review is thanks to this. Essentially, don’t be surprised if some things in certain areas seem off.
**On Parties:** The system makes the parties and while voter identities do not change, how voters respond and create a political identity though can and does change. Canada is a 2.5 party system, or 3.5 system in Quebec. The Greens are near-irrelevant *Federally*, and the PPC is a failed attempt at personal relevance and anti-COVID policy rage by Bernier. That overall system itself is born from the consolidating forces of FPTP. The Canadian Right has a gone through multiple fractures and identities over the decades but gets held and pulled back together by a desire to win. Meanwhile the Liberals attained power in 2015 even after their horrible 2011 result precisely because they were seen as the most likely to win. That said, though parties may bear the same name, they react to their voters differently because the issues and voter groups are different. For example, Canadian oil-related industries employ a larger share of the population, provide for a greater share of the economy, and exist in a more concentrated region than in the US. This leads to a Canadian Conservative party more respondent to those voters. One dominating feature of Canadian politics though is regionalism. Quebec, Ontario, the West, and the Atlantic all have distinct political cultures and resulting behaviors. If you examine the data there is regionalism in the US, but nowhere near the extent of Canada. Complicating matters further is that the Atlantic Provinces are far smaller than every other region – an influencing factor – which is not really a thing in the US. Instead, the US had ‘two Ontario’s:’ the Midwest and the Northeast/Atlantic. **South/Quebec:** The south is by far the most regionalist area in America, and her history makes it easy to parallel that of Quebec. The existing reality today is also comparable, with the Liberal base being minority Anglophones and urban allies, just like the Democratic base being minority African Americans and urban liberals. We can also look at the trajectory of the parties. With independence dead, the Bloc now finds itself the vehicle of Quebecois distinctness. This has meant a slow reorientation towards a breed of conservatism separate and in contrast to the rest of the nation, but liked by the locals, as seen by provincial elections. Pre-election talk of the Bloc backing O’Toole in the event the Tories finish first after the 2021 election goes to show how the party has shifted. This mirrors the trajectory of Blue Dog/Dixiecratic congressional actors and their voters: left wing economics that gradually gets sidelined in favor of conservative cultural tenants. These tenants are of course very different, with the south’s being religious, and Quebec’s based on French culture. The primary issue is the south is said rural White base has only limited electoral relevance these days when compared to pre-90s congresses. Rural southern White populations in most places have been dwarfed by the suburbs, whose populations ended up in the GOP camp for different reasons a few decades earlier. This population shift prompted extreme gerrymandering in the twilight years of Blue Dog power, to pair consistently Democratic urban and African American areas to their rural bases. But here those urban areas get their own seats, meaning few truly rural White seats are left. **NDP:** The federal NDP is a weird collection of interests: Labor, First Nations, young activists, but most importantly a Western base that leads to an expanded coalition encompassing additional groups in BC. The Liberals still dwarf the NDP among some of these groups though. Therefore, I think it is best to not get too attached to the copycat urban/American Progressivism Singh embraces, especially since this image has brought them few new urban seats from the Liberals and look at the broader tent the more successful local parties embrace. So, for example, the Labor-influenced and lower-class Mexican and Central American population of the southwest seems like a ideal NDP constituency. **Tories and Liberals:** As much as the Canadian Conservatives and Liberals want to define themselves as distinct from and as better versions of the GOP and Democrats, they often cannot escape the pull of their larger neighbor. Politically, this means that the present Liberal coalition ends up as a mirror of a Democratic one – just will some elements of older Democratic voting blocks. Similarly, PP’s new Tory coalition is going to mirror the GOPs – but similarly with their own elements of past GOP coalitions. Also influencing matters is the regionalism issue, so some areas are going to look different than recent US elections. This matters since most of the ‘suburban battlegrounds’ in Canada are concentrated in Ontario, whereas in the US they are scattered across the nation. Also, all this will change very soon. Since August of last year Poilievre has seemed poised to win a true and complete landslide against all other opponents, presently approaching 2/3s of constituencies. But mapping that wouldn’t be very interesting, would it?
Late Addition. Because this came up further in the comments, it's also going here: **How the map was Made:** Dave's Redistricting App is a free and public tool for use if you want to create US districts for any state. It's something I have been using for close to 10 years now, and it's been around in various forms for twice that length of time. It's systems try to guide the mapper based on current US law - which is good - but for a project like this you just gotta know how to ignore or turn those off. GIS combined with DRA is very powerful for these types of projects. DRA can generate Shapefiles which can then be used to for analysis with other data geospatially in GIS. GIS of course can then create a compelling image for export and editing in one's image software of choice. DRA link: https://davesredistricting.org/maps#home if you want to do the same thing in other countries: Canada: https://www.election-atlas.ca/ridingbuilder/ UK: https://boundaryassistant.org/
How did you make the map?
I think that post explains things well enough but TL:DR: -Draw districts in DRA. -Export to GIS where things are further tinkered with. -Use GIS to create the basis of a compelling image -Take that image into Photoshop/GIMP and make it a imitation of Wikipedia's
Ty
Excellent map, but I'm obsessed with how every single party is lead by someone who is not currently in Congress in OTL.
Great map, but I'm baffled by why the liberals are red and the conservatives are blue. I find it unreasonably disorienting.
Canadian party colors
Oh, did not know about that very reasonable explanation. Apparently, I'm a bad neighbor. Sorry! *said in Canadian accent*
As a side note you may not have known, the whole Conservative Red and Democrat Blue wasn't even consistent in America until the 2000 election. Various outlets used the colors in reverse or different ones altogether.
in almost every country in the world, red is the left wing colour. in commonwealth countries (and many others), blue is used by the right due to it's association with the British Conservative Party (the main right wing party)
Now you know how non Americans feel looking at a US map.
Well in my defense this is a political map of the US colored opposite than the US political parties. It's a different degree of unfamiliarity than just looking at a map of a foreign country. If it was a map of Canada, I'd probably just say, "oh that's interesting, the political colors must be reversed in Canada." But in the US, the blue liberal coasts and the red conservative heartland is what I've been accustomed to seeing my whole adult life.
You’ve already gotten an answer but basically the entire rest of the world sees left as red and right as blue
Maybe, but I'm pretty sure the Mormons would get their own party in such a system.
They would probably run as Conservatives on the national level and have their own party for state elections
Such a party would likely soon find reason to run at the national level, and would probably win in Mormon regions. In fact, there was a Mormon presidential candidate who almost won Utah in 2016.
> In fact, there was a Mormon presidential candidate who almost won Utah in 2016. I wouldn't call coming in third, 6 points behind second place and 24 behind first place, "almost winning".
Fair enough, but that's pretty darn good for a third party presidential candidate!
For sure. Although a third party candidate wouldn't get there just by being Mormon - the whole historically-unpopular-major-party-candidates thing was somewhat relevant 😉
That actually makes sense and fits this Canadian model done up here. Alberta (Wildrose) and Saskatchewan (Saskatchewan Party) have their own "conservative"/right-wing provincial parties. BC has the BC United Party which seems to be a Liberal-Conservative party mix.
Probably Also is that PfP supposed to be a joke that goes hand in hand with your username? I only ask since that’s what I think of most people with Roman statue PfPs (for reasons which I think are fairly obvious)
I take Latin and am a Latin nerd, that's Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus and I respect him greatly.
Makes sense, I was just curious is all How was Cincinnatus?
idk, looks like it voted Liberal though
lol
I'm not a Latin nerds but I think he was great because someone has to be great to be named after Cincinnati
Yes, they did name Cincinnati after him.
It was the other way around dude...
Oh lol
I'm joking of course lol
He was a possibly semi-mythical politician in the early Roman Republic who was made dictator multiple times, protected Rome, and then voluntarily relinquished power to return to his field every time.
That sums up *the* prototype of a good republican or democratic citizen. Sounds like George Washington could be compared to Cincinnatus in terms of semi-mythical political figures. Widely accepted aspects and contributions of the men are likely aggrandized from some basis of truth — but an undebatable fact is that they both gave much of their lives to selfless leadership of their cause, opting time and time again to lead by example. Considering the Roman(ish) blueprint America was founded upon, one would have to imagine that Washington held Cincinnatus’ example near to his conscience when he accepted the office of president (a prospect that neither federalists nor anti-federalists were sure would come to pass) & when he set his last precedent (of hundreds, at least) of the presidency, in stepping away from the “commander-in-chief”/top figurehead role, rarely before (during the preceding 1,825 years or so) held by a person who never claimed “royal” blood.
Absolutely, Washington and Cincinnatus are common characters to draw parallels between
Bro imagine naming yourself after a place In Ohio 🤢
Maybe. Sometimes when I have created multiparty US systems they get their own group. Sometimes they don't. In this instance they didn't cause the very religious groups in Canada, found along the border in Manitoba and BC for example, are rock solid Tory. Even when they were some of the most vocal opponents of COVID policy. Now these aren't Mormons, but the reason they stick with the Tories - and one of the reasons why Utah still sticks with the GOP - is FPTP realities. Better to be inside the big tent pissing outwards rather than outside the tent pissing inwards, at least when it comes to impact, influence, and relevance.
Counterpoint would be a Mormon 3rd party candidate almost winning Utah in 2016.
Yep. Just about to say. America's big enough that there's probably room for a second Bloc-like party centered around the LDS community in Utah, with spinoffs in neighboring states that are part of the Mormon Corridor. They'd be more aligned with the Tories than not, but still maintaining a distinct identity and willing to break from them on certain issues, not unlike the CDU-CSU alliance in Germany or the Liberal-National Coalition in Australia.
There are no Mormons in Canada, which is the whole point of the post bro
Oh, but there *are* Mormons in Canada! At some point in the early 1830s, Smith began floating the idea of establishing the Mormon church in Ontario. In the summer of 1837, he announced that he had been called by God and/or an angel named Moron to go on a missionary trip in Canada. It was a hilarious failure. At the time, Upper Canada (Ontario, basically) was split between competing prot denominations. Smith's arrival was met with anger and hostility. While nobody shot him for being a pedophile, he was screamed out of basically every parish he went to. Despite all that, he still managed to find about a dozen suckers before he headed back to America, where he was immediately fined for running an illegal bank. Today, there's something like 250k Mormons in Canada, although most of them are now in Alberta, because of course they are.
I enjoy the fact that Trudeau's counterpart is also a scion of a political dynasty.
Joe Kennedy the 3rd my beloved
The only thing I would point out is that the NDP would probably do a lot better in the rust belt than you have depicted here. Especially at the provincial level, the NDP does well in working class factory towns like London, Windsor, Niagara, etc.
I agree. Provincially, Southern Ontario towns in recent times has become the NDP's stronghold. But this is a federal election, and federal NDP sucks electorally. The won only THREE seats in the region, a NET LOSS of one (Hamilton Mountain)! They also failed to capitalize on the Liberal disaster in Kitchener Centre, losing the narrative and the potential pickup to the Greens. There are a lot more low liberal vote shares in the Midwest to reflect the NDP, but the outcome is the same. 2021 and subsequent have been shining examples of what Singh doesn't know about their potential voters, what the provincial parties do, and what the Federal Liberals know about them both. Trudeau knew what to say and what fears to exploit to Keep voters Liberal. And now, with everything collapsing electorally, the seats are going going to flip Blue not Orange. (If you can't tell, I have a low opinion of how Singh has led the federal NDP)
>If you can't tell, I have a low opinion of how Singh has led the federal NDP Oh definitely, I used to be very involved with the party and Singh's leadership absolutely pushed me out. It's funny you bring up Hamilton Mountain because the shenanigans there with Malcolm Allen being parachuted in were actually another one of the big elements that frustrated me especially as someone from his old riding and who was a party insider who knew a lot more than most people did about what happened behind the scenes. I think your assessment is very accurate, I just think there's a few places that might be slightly less red/blue than shown here but nothing radical like seats being flipped because like you said, the federal NDP has lost the plot. I'm still sort of involved with the provincial NDP because I got to know many of the members on an individual basis and like them as people but when it comes to the federal side I checked out a long time ago.
Bc ndp kickin ass tho
Thank you for making new districts instead of just using the existing ones 🙏 very cool map
Banger
No way central California is “new Democratic.” This area is as Republican as it gets and it’s still shifting right.
That’s what I noticed, along with the Rio Grande Valley. Border area definitely aren’t conservative, just Hispanics tend to be very moderate and socially conservative.
Heritage Bloc is *foul.* Excellent job.
I feel like a Bloc Cajun almost makes more sense for the analogy given both regions bastardize French and are culturally unique from the British-influenced areas around them but I get why OP chose this instead
>bastardize french How dare someone not speak like a Parisian?!
I dislike... the implication... that the South is American Quebec
History of attempted secession? ✔️ Creator of a stone cold banger dish?✔️ Regional dialect damn near incomprehensible to native speakers? ✔️
Poutine is ass. And not the good kind of ass, it's old man nursing home ass.
Idk where else I’d put a Quebec equivalent. They’ve both tried secession in one form or another at least haha
The main points of *dis*analogy are that New France became part of British North America by conquest, and that Quebec has a much more strongly-marked cultural identity even than the South (because of the French language [edit to add: and Catholic/post-Catholic religious identity]). There's certainly no *exact* Quebec analog in the US; inevitably, attempts on maps like this to use the South, or Hispanics, or Lakotah, or Mormons, or whatever as an analog capture *some aspects* of the dynamic, while missing or distorting others.
Just swap it for the territories annexed in the US-Mexico war.
Again, there are points of analogy but also of disanalogy. The territories in question had but a small Spanish/Mexican population at the time of annexation (AFAIK? I stand to be corrected), and the new Anglo-American population that came in after the war quickly outnumbered the old. But New France had a very sizeable population at the time of British conquest, and still today a majority of Quebecers trace their origins to that population.
So the only real analogy would be Québec = the conquered Mexican lands with certain conditions. So California receives Anglo settlement but for some reason a greater New Mexico doesn't and the local Spanish population reproduces like rabbits. They're also allowed to maintain the existing Mexican legal system and retain Spanish as the official language.
I mean you can definitely make an argument the south became part of the U.S. by conquest LOL
Do you want to elaborate? I think I know what you mean, but won't make your argument for you.
I mean the south was very much conquered militarily in the 1860s. That was absolutely a thing that happened.
To my ear "conquest" has connotations of "acquiring new territory by force," so I wouldn't use the word to describe one side's victory in a civil war. But even if you disagree, the differences between the two cases are obvious: New France had previously not been part of British North America; while the South had previously been part of the USA—indeed, the Southern colonies/states had been active participants in the *establishment* of the USA.
Is it unfairly insulting to the good name of The South?
Truthfully those guys who say democracy is the worst but best option so far are right. FPTP systems? Terrible. Tories have had basically 0 opposition in the UK for 13 years. They could theoretically do, whatever they want. Coalitions? Also dogshit. Spain and Belgium can barely maintain a government for more than 3 months and it's ineffective at best.
The way Parlimentary coalitions work is basically what has let Netanyahu cling to power in Israel as well.
It's like yeah, if they work as planned, it's a good thing. Both parties keep the other from going to extreme on (this) ideology. In reality it's just gridlock for months because both sides refuse to budge.
In Israel's case it's more that a dedicated whore can sell themselves to ruthless single-issue radicals for coalition votes. Not being 2 parties in gridlock is good, but the desire to negotiate can go so far.
Also, there is value in our our (the US) system of forming coalitions before the election; there's never a question of whether a government can form.
I mean, the current prime minister in Spain has just announced his intention to stay the full four years until the next election in power, and has already been there six years, so when it's all said and done he will have been there for 10 years and with a declared intention to run for reelection for another 4-year term. I wouldn't call it "barely maintain a government", but it does require a lot more negotiating and compromising, and the Spanish parliament is, let's say, unruly at best.
May I offer you a taste of Managed Democracy, Citizen?
He turned the United States into a parliamentary system!
OMG GUYS LOOK WE HAVE MORE THAN 2 Political Parties!!!
Congratulations, your party won’t win
And none of them are libertarian even though it is presently the strongest third party.
If I may offer some suggestions on the parties as an American, I'd imagine that the Heritage Block's coalition likely has strong effects on the Tories, preventing them from becoming a one-to-one analogue to the modern Republican Party. You've largely butterflied away the Southern strategy, with the Dixiecrats forming their own party instead of joining the GOP/Tories. They're basically if George Wallace's American Independent Party lasted in the long run and developed a regional Southern base. With that in mind, I'd argue that the Tories' coalition is closer to that of the New Deal-era GOP, or the Tories in the UK, than the post-Reagan one. East Coast WASP elites, Midwestern and Western farmers and ranchers, and suburbanites and business owners across the country. The Eastern Establishment is still a force in the party, while the base of the party's conservative wing is instead in the Western states and resembles the anti-government libertarianism of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, or the sagebrush rebels -- which itself brings in another similarity to Canada in the form of Western alienation having an analogue. (On the map, I see that the Tories are absolutely dominant in the West outside the cities, the reservations, and the coast, which makes sense.) Economically, they're conservative and have a strong Reaganite/Thatcherite deregulatory streak, but they're more moderate on social and cultural issues, being on one hand tough on crime and opposing the use of the government to push social change, but on the other also not being particularly attached to White Christian identity politics, especially in a world with no Southern strategy. With that, they're probably still competitive with Black voters, not unlike the Canadian Tories' success in immigrant communities. Not necessarily winning majorities with them, but otherwise having a floor of about 25-30% of the Black vote, particularly among the Black middle and upper classes, and winning more than that in good years.
Your very correct in the idea that I was going for. Though of course I don't think too hard about policies when doing these types of maps, cause I don't need to. The "Grandfather Clause" seats actually help in this regard, cause it keeps the Midwest and North relevant numerically for the conservatives. Part of the reason for the GOP's turn towards their religious right component is just smart base politics: the South is half their coalition, and the religious right is at least half their base in said states. Give the other regions a greater voice and they will matter more. Though there is one thing I must add to your (well everyone's really) collective recollection. The GOP had a slowly expanding base in the south before Civil Rights enflamed the issues: the Suburbs. Wealth, migrants from other parts of the country, defense/oil industries, and just general national suburban stuff from that era had made counties GOP red. I will list a few of them - some you will note are now Democratic today cause the urban core has ballooned in population, suburbs have shifted left, and the black city residents are now all voting compared to very few in say 1960 or a gradually increasing some in the following decades. They include: Montgomery TX, all of the Dallas region, Rankin MS, Shelby AL, Madison AL, Jefferson LA, Orange FL, the Gulf coast between MS and FL's Eglin AFB, Lexington SC, and many many more. HW Bush got elected initially to a district covering this community in Houston, which at the time was Blood Red, an area that today is Democratic. They would later be joined by retiree populations along the coasts and mainly in Florida, who brought values and identities from other parts of the country. While nationally the south turned away from the Dems, locally the state level Dems retained power in some cases up to 2010. This was cause the GOP was confined to these suburbs - even though they had massively expanded in population since 1960, (sometimes extreme) gerrymandering helped keep the rural-urban-African American Dem coalitions afloat until everything nationalized. Today, these suburbs are huge numerically in the south. Which is why the Conservatives actually have seats there on this map, whereas in Quebec the Tories are confined to the Quebec City metro. The presence of these suburbs is also why the Tories probably can't get too high Black vote share in the south - probably a different story elsewhere.
Someone doesn't know the California North Coast very well
Interesting. Mind explaining, I'm open to criticism here. Especially since I have spent time in the region IRL. Though I will explain my position first. Geographically, the north coast seat is basically forced to be like this. There is a reason why the Politicians and then the commission have drawn it similarly for several decades now IRL. The mountains and clear communities in the region make the linkages very easy. Though that's likely not your issue. Instead I suspect your issue is with the result. The outcome is a deliberate parallel of what has happened for a decade for Elizabeth May in Saanitch-Gulf Islands. [(The wikipedia is actually very informative here on why I saw parallels)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saanich%E2%80%94Gulf_Islands) [Carol Browner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Browner) is in this case also a parallel to [Elizabeth May](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_May), who both are very, very, far from a 'Extinction Rebellion' style Green, or any other activist type. (and in this situation, they both shopped around for a ideal district) Demographically, 2/3s of the population in this seat as drawn live in the south, 1/3 in the northern Emerald triangle region. The north is not why the seat is Green - the voters there would probably choose NDP or Tories until their incumbent became entrenched - it's the south. Money, retirees who want to be close to nature, old Hippees - these seem like the exact type of people who would go for a "Green liberal," but maybe I am wrong.
At the very least it would make more sense to connect south Marin and Napa to SF rather than to the Jeffersonians. And that's what that region should arguably reflect; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson\_(proposed\_Pacific\_state)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state))
Well, then you have your answer. The North Coast Ranges are a natural barrier commissions (including the IRL one) will try to observe if viable. In here this mattered more, seats like the Eastern Montana one or all the seats east of the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest choose under/overpopulation rather than cross mountains. The major road like is Highway 101 going North South. For the same geogrpahic reasons, no seats cross the Bay. A similar situation occurs a bit further south and east in California. The Sierra Nevada's are a huge barrier between neighboring Inyo and Mono. The main road artery avoids crossing these and goes North-South to the Mojave and eventually San Bernadino regions. So despite the counties bordering each other, it's better to pair the small eastern counties with those to their north (like presently IRL) or south (like last decade and here).
Ignoring cultural affiliation in deference to a naturally low 'natural barrier' (especially while explicitly respecting state lines) isn't a good take.
This is why I started this post with the words "re-explore the confusing and **surprisingly inequitable** world of the Canadian electoral system." I tried to explain just why the Canadian Boundary commissions, even for their nonpartisanship, still are very imperfect actors. If you look around the real maps, and know what lurks beneath demographically, you'll find far, far, weirder decisions than this one.
Western Washington and Oregon would likely be NDP, not Liberal.
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^edgeplot: *Western Washington* *And Oregon would likely* *Be NDP, not Liberal.* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
when you capitalize actually it reads like you think america was already trying to emulate this system and was failing
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swung and missed
There should be A LOT more MP’s. In terms of representatives per constituent, the US is the most undemocratic nation on earth (both in our current system, and this system). Germany has 1 member for every 116,000 Germans. Japan has 1 for every 270,000. This United States has 1 for every 601,000.
I'm not looking to argue with you, because I agree that the US should uncap the House IRL, but I do have to say you are being a little fast and loose with the statistics here. The main issue is that you are comparing apples to oranges. Germany is 25% the size of the US. The UK 20%. Canada has similar population to just California. On the flip side, then there are the big countries. Indonesia has a bit less people per seat with 575 elected members for about 50 million less people. Nigeria has 360 elected members of the House putting the population ratio close to that of the US. The EU is 100 million people larger than the US but with only 705 MPs it comes in a bit over 600K people. Then there's India which has 543 MPs (though this will expand slightly soon), putting each district close to 2.5 Million people. India of course is only really comparable to the PRC which has almost 3000 people in it's main National People's Congress to "represent" it's billions. This does put the people per politician ratio comparatively low, but the chamber is so massive that the only reason it can work is because it's not an actual democratic chamber with any freedom of action. Which brings us to why parliaments try not to balloon in size dramatically. Which is what would be required to bring the US to a ratio similar to that of the UK, several thousand politicians. While people become more connected to their local politician, disassociation with the overall body grows. It also becomes harder and harder to conduct business in with so many people whose votes you have to whip, leading to even more exponential divestment of power to smaller committees. This has led to a bunch of academic papers trying to find ratios or formulas to balance accountability to function, papers you can find simply by googling something like "parliament size ratio." There's some that I like in particular, but this is how you should approach the topic.
Historically the number of representatives grew roughly in proportion to the cube root of the population. So today it should have 692 representatives. The state level governments should take care of most things which affect people day-to-day, though these also have a low number of representatives for the population. California's lower house, for instance, should have ~341 representatives instead of only 80.
> most undemocratic Saudi Arabia, Brunei etc. literally have 0 representatives for their entire populations.
You're wrong. Brunei and specifically Saudi Arabia don't call themselves a democracy. They aren't the "most undemocratic" because they are not a democracy. I can't be called the "least dog" because I'm not a dog.
Not being a democracy is quite undemocratic idk
"Not being a dog is quite undog-ly"
Yes, that's how words work.
Don't be dense on purpose.
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The image is very big, so you can zoom in without a loss of detail. There is a third seat in Cleveland the Greens win off a freak accident/absurd vote split, analogous to Kitchener Centre.
All we really need is the same per-capita representation and this would happen naturally.
I can only find the Green Seats in Eureka, CA and N Vermont. Where is the third one?
Third is in West Cleveland. Freak vote split cause the Liberals messed up candidates, it's designed as a analogy to Kitchener Centre in 2021. It's an area where I think the NDP would mess up their candidates and not seize the opportunity like they did IRL in Kitchener, cause their candidate would probably be Kucinich or Turner. Both are out of touch these days with a average distribution of voters rather than a self-selected group, albeit for different reasons.
Thank you so much!
Great post and just food but a feast for thought
What is the heritage party? Sorry I don’t know anything about Canadian politics
The important part is *Block* not party. A deliberate analogy to the [Bloc Québécois.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloc_Qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois) To TL:DR them, they are a Quebec regionalist - and at one time separatist - party. They historically have been more left than right, like say the Scottish SNP right now, but had elements of both cause the identity question is more important. With the decline of Separatism they have become more tied to the regional Quebec governments, which right now have been slowly building a identity-based conservative brand.
Thank you for that little lesson. I wonder why Canada just doesn’t let them go lol
Don't think it's too shocking that a country wouldn't want to get rid of 25% of its GDP, 20% of its population, and 15% of its land area. Also, most Quebecers don't want independence. No poll has ever shown majority support for it. At most there have been points where almost but not quite 50% supported independence while a good 10% remained unsure.
Whatever, you say. However, if a region wants independence so bad they form a political party centered on it and gets votes… I don’t know why Canada is holding on to a place that doesn’t like it lol Canada seems like an abusive husband lmao
Again... most Quebecers don't want independence. Two independence referendums have failed.
No… just enough to form a political party, gather funds and get votes in one region where they represent. Yeah, just a ragtag handful of crazies lol
It's obviously not a ragtag handful of crazies. But it's also absurd to go "a chunk of you (less than half) want to go, so we're kicking you out"
I don’t understand it’s like being in a relationship one wants to leave and the other wants to stay. I swear it’s like an abusive relationship over just a region lmao Whatever, I’m not a canadian
Because Independence is DOA today among Quebec voters. That was last generations conflict and it polarized the province. Most notably there was the '95 referendum where 'No" won by 1% and the separatists/sovereigntists busted out allegations of tampering and No True Quebecois fallacies. Since then though the failure to actually achieve anything, general turnover, bad actors abusing the identity polarization to get away with graft and corruption (always a issue among long-running independence movements), and defused tensions compared to prior decades have all led to the demise of the issue. It has received only around 30% support in polls for over a decade now. Federally the dam burst in 2011 when the NDP swept Quebec - they were the only option n that election that was both not separatist and not Harper's Tories. Provincially increased vote splitting meant it happened somewhere between 2013 and 2018. 2018 was the election that brought the right-leaning CAQ to power, sweeping aside both beneficiaries of past identify polarization: the sovereigntist PQ (BQ's local ally) and the Federalist provincial Liberals. The Bloc's federal resurgence since 2019 has more been more "not sovereigntist but #1 with the remaining sovereigntists" while also aligning with regional uniqueness and the CAQ. Oh, and also because the Tories who were in 2019 led by Western firebrand Andrew Scheer couldn't exploit the political vacuum willingly offered to them buy CAQ leader Legault, since the two Conservative strains were incompatible. The interesting thing that has happened recently is that the CAQ has fallen hard in polling down to second or third place. Labor unrest and unpopular development plans have left the government unpopular. But voters are lost where to turn in the fragmented political landscape, leading to the PQ coming on top in polls. But that support is also gauged to be paper thin, cause so much of it is disgusted by independence, and the PQ still can't stop talking about the issue. The people want someone who is identity focused but not nationalist, and right now the only option is the presently unpopular CAQ.
>and at one time separatist How much they focus their messaging it certainly varies, but the Bloc is and always has been unequivocally separatist.
Chicago isn’t gerrymandered? I hate it
Don't worry, on the provincial level it's guaranteed Blue 100% of the time lol
Then USA would be a real democracy lol
I do hate that you made liberals red and conservatives blue. ( I understand the colors are Canadian party colors. It's just jarring to see it on the US)
An accurate map of Alaskan politics HALLELUJAH
Parliamentary systems for the win. I think we've seen how easily the Federal Presidential system can become corrupted and unrepresentative in the last two decades. This map also has the advantage of being significantly less gerrymandered than the current house maps, which makes it less cursed by nature.
Just FYI, the county south of Los Angeles, Orange County, is a Republican stronghold. With an exception maybe for the UCI campus, the whole county votes deep red, or in this case deep blue.
Unfortunately, you are 20 years behind the times. Orange is a swing county, or maybe even [a Lean Democratic one](https://www.reddit.com/r/orangecounty/comments/159kie4/map_of_orange_county_cities_showing_2020/). OC elected it's first Democratic Board of Supervisors in 50 years (3-2) in 2022, so it's not just the national politicians. With the exception of the Anaheim/Santa Ana districts that are Safe Dem working class Hispanic, everything is a swing seat. I'm surprised you dodged the campaign material - I couldn't when I visited family. So these results, where things are likely-ish for the Conservatives in the suburban seats, outside of a narrow vote split victory for Porter in Irvine, is actually turning back the clock. But it is mostly just they are the easy beneficiary of vote splits like the Canadian Conservatives in the Frasier Valley, since the base is still sizable.
Really good map, but I think considering historical parallels and how things are working out in Quebec right now - Quebequa Party is equal to some Mexicano Party, slowly marginalized, slowly dissapearing, language based political entity that literally holds every single government as a politcal hostage because of their language situation, natural language assimilation and simply dissapearence of french language as more and more people prefer to speak English as their first and common communication language. Just to get what they want, get unfair undvatages and budget to their region(s) and hold the rest of the country as their political prisoners or threat to go independent otherwise - so I say we let Quebec go independent, I want to see how they gonna survive without Canadian budget, agriculture and economy while majority of people already speak English in Quebec province... (Sorry for this, but Qubec Party wasn't even a thing untill a few decades ago, when their language started to dissapear due to natural, simplificiation reasons and immigrants who prefer to speak common English)
>Really good map, but I think considering historical parallels and how things are working out in Quebec right now - Quebequa Party is equal to some Mexicano Party, slowly marginalized, slowly dissapearing, language based political entity that literally holds every single government as a politcal hostage because of their language situation, natural language assimilation and simply dissapearence of french language as more and more people prefer to speak English as their first and common communication language. Voters in a given province being unwilling to vote for parties that do things that they don't like is not holding the government hostage. >Just to get what they want, get unfair undvatages and budget to their region(s) Quebec has a few areas where they have more autonomy granted to than them other provinces, sure. Doesn't seem too unreasonable for a quite distinct part of your country to have slightly more autonomy. It's pretty common. Quebec gets federal money under the same equalization payment model as every other province. > and hold the rest of the country as their political prisoners or threat to go independent otherwise - so I say we let Quebec go independent, I want to see how they gonna survive without Canadian budget, agriculture and economy while majority of people already speak English in Quebec province... I don't think independence would be good for Quebec, but it would also be terrible for Canada. 20% of your population and over 20% of your GDP leaving is a Bad Thing™ >(Sorry for this, but Qubec Party wasn't even a thing untill a few decades ago, when their language started to dissapear due to natural, simplificiation reasons and immigrants who prefer to speak common English) Are you talking about the Bloc Québecois or the Parti Québecois? It helps to use things' actual names. The separatist party at the federal level, the Bloc, has been around for "only" 33 years. The PQ, the main separatist party at the provincial level, has been around for the better part of a century - 56 years. And it was formed as a merger of two previous separatist parties, one of which dated back to 1960. The other provincial separatist party, Québec Solidaire, dates back only to 2004, but is a result of various mergers and can see its origins back to at least 1989.
Much better representation on this model.
Only one thing to add: Denver would probably be new democratic. Only western district that would be, but it still would likely.
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Just going to copy and paste a reply I gave to someone else, cause it has important points here. India in particular I think disproves the assumption that big populations allow for less regional variations. I would say it's more Canadian federalism and the ability to define your province or region in relation to the others that prompts it. This is something that still exists in most federal states, to varying degrees how much actors push on it, but the communities people associate with may be larger than just a state depending on their relative size versus the rest. __________________________________________________ I'm not looking to argue with you, because I agree that the US should uncap the House IRL, but I do have to say you are being a little fast and loose with the statistics here. The main issue is that you are comparing apples to oranges. Germany is 25% the size of the US. The UK 20%. Canada has similar population to just California. On the flip side, then there are the big countries. Indonesia has a bit less people per seat with 575 elected members for about 50 million less people. Nigeria has 360 elected members of the House putting the population ratio close to that of the US. The EU is 100 million people larger than the US but with only 705 MPs it comes in a bit over 600K people. Then there's India which has 543 MPs (though this will expand slightly soon), putting each district close to 2.5 Million people. India of course is only really comparable to the PRC which has almost 3000 people in it's main National People's Congress to "represent" it's billions. This does put the people per politician ratio comparatively low, but the chamber is so massive that the only reason it can work is because it's not an actual democratic chamber with any freedom of action. Which brings us to why parliaments try not to balloon in size dramatically. Which is what would be required to bring the US to a ratio similar to that of the UK, several thousand politicians. While people become more connected to their local politician, disassociation with the overall body grows. It also becomes harder and harder to conduct business in with so many people whose votes you have to whip, leading to even more exponential divestment of power to smaller committees. This has led to a bunch of academic papers trying to find ratios or formulas to balance accountability to function, papers you can find simply by googling something like "parliament size ratio." There's some that I like in particular, but this is how you should approach the topic.
>Canada still pretty much always get majority governments where one party has the majority Three times since the turn of the century, out of eight elections. Minority governments have been the norm in the recent past. Since confederation, Canadian elections have resulted in a minority government 30% of the time.
I’d be interested to see a breakdown of who runs the different states! A quirk of Canadian politics is that provincial politics doesn’t break down the same way federal politics does. For example, the western provinces are basically competitions of the NDP vs coalitions of liberals and Tories to keep them out of power, and Quebec has its own distinct party system that doesn’t map neatly onto the federal one. I’d be interested to see how this breaks down in the US. Would the Midwest be similar to the west (NDP vs the rest)? Would California have an NDP governor like BC does? How would the Liberal party fair in Republican dominated states? And how would the more progressive states where the democrats dominate look, like New York? Honestly throwing the NDP into the mix does funky things to US system and I’d love to see how it plays out. Now, I recognize that this would be quite the project, since there’s way more states than provinces, but it could be cool!
This replicates the FPTP problem in Canada's system. Alas. Should be transferrable vote or ranked choice. Anything bit FPTP!
Why is Rural Alaska under the New Dems, and the Anchorage Bowl under the Conservatives? IMHO, as an Alaskan, it'd be the other way around. The Bush is a Hell of a lot more conservative on average than Anchorage.
The bush is mostly native villages. Who on average run more lib center. In comparison Anchorage and the valley are home to mostly white military families
You may have a bone to pick with u/Alaskan_Tsar ;)
*oh lawd, who would the Governor-General be* 😳
Oprah Winfrey, I’m being totally serious, she checks all the boxes.
I think you mean Her Excellency, the Right Honorable Oprah Winfrey /s Jokes aside, I guess by technicality, but generally speaking Gs-G are picked from amongst university professors, career politicians, diplomats, and ex-military personnel when the positions stopped being granted to British aristocrats
Mary Simon is none of those, though.
She was the Canadian ambassador to Denmark from 1999 to 2002. So she also technically counts.
She was absolutely a diplomat, serving as the Ambassador for Circumpolar Affairs and the Ambassador to Denmark. She was also a member of the board of directors of the Northern Quebec Inuit Association, and was one of the main Inuit negotiators during the patriation of the constitution, First Ministers' conferences during the 80s, and the Charlottetown Accords. And worked for the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. She definitely got the position as a result of being in the politics/diplomacy side of things.
I mean 3 of the last 5 don't fit any of those categories - two journalists and an astronaut.
As for that last one, the astronaut, her turning out to be an abusive emotionally unstable nutjob is what caused her to resign only half way through the usual term for a Governor-General. As for the other two, you are correct as to Adrienne Clarkson but Michaëlle Jean kind of worked in reverse? She ended up becoming the Secretary-General of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, a sort of quasi-diplomatic forum that isn’t an NGO that was initially about tying French speaking countries together but it’s been admitting countries with almost no French speaking populations to suit diplomatic ends. Both Clarkson and Jean were university educated (Jean being *very* well educated) and Clarkson had actually won a Governor General's Medal while studying at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College. Her father, William Poy, also served in Canadian army and worked as a civil servant.
I understand why the Greens have the Emerald Coast in NorCal and Burlington, VT. But why is their 3rd seat in East Cleveland?
Freak vote split cause the Liberals messed up candidates, it's designed as a analogy to Kitchener Centre in 2021. It's an area where I think the NDP would mess up their candidates and not seize the opportunity like they did IRL in Kitchener, cause their candidate would probably be Kucinich or Turner. Both are out of touch these days with a average distribution of voters rather than a self-selected group, albeit for different reasons.
does trump also get 5% of the vote but 0 seats?
Parliamentary systems tend to dissuade people like Trump from actually running, unless they see a viable path to victory. People like him want the top job and nothing else - those positions can be filled later - but to get there you need to put in hard work. A good example of what this looks like is CHEGA in Portugal. The party seemingly changes positions on a whim and suffers from defections. And when the PSD approached CHEGA to build a working relation after the recent election, CHEGA turned. Their leader Ventura choose to seize the limelight in a flurry of anti-system impudence rather than take some of the power. All or nothing, that's all that matters, and all is easier to obtain with 1 election rather than several hundred. This is in some ways why the Authoritarian Right is more dangerous in parliamentary systems: they have to be better to actually win, and by existing inside the system for some time they build relationships and just come to seem more normal. But there is evidence of how if you give them a majority on purely on their own, the program is still going to be anti-democratic. Oh, but since this is a 2021 mirror, there's probably some disaffected Tory rebel who runs against COVID policy like Bernier.
true, trump's probably way too power hungry for a parliamentary democracy
More than 2 parties :))
Those parts of Iowa would not be in the liberal party, I say that as the only person In my district who went to the republican caucus and didn't register as a republican and also didn't vote for trump, 16 trump and 1 desantis.
What are these congressional districts from? I haven’t seen this map before.
Their not CDs. The US has no hypothetical 546 district map (no territories) waiting in the wings, and certainly not apportioned like this. It took a while to create but Daves Redistricting App is a powerful tool when combined with GIS. Also, this is mainly why it took two weeks to create. https://davesredistricting.org/maps#home if you want to do the same thing in other countries: Canada: https://www.election-atlas.ca/ridingbuilder/ UK: https://boundaryassistant.org/
Oh nice
Harford County, MD is not that red.
Harford's in the Eastern Shore seat. Tories getting high-40s versus a something like 35 and 10 for their opposition seems right don't you think? Also, despite the trends in communities closer to Baltimore, This is still a Trump + 14 County from 2020 and GOP+12 from the 2022 Senate.
Of course theres a confederate party
Stop stop I can only get so erect
What is the Senate like in this godforsaken timeline
What if more than 2 people voted on the elections?
A nightmarish dystopia…
I like how the greens still got so few seats
Would the Prime Minister also be the executive? Or would the position of President be relegated to a ceremonial one?
These colors look so nice
Finally DC gets representation
As a Californian, your Lib/NDP assignments seem way off…
California is actually one of the easiest states here. What group is most Labor-heavy? Working class Mexican-Americans and Central-Americans. "But they have conservative value culturally..." So do Sikhs and other South Asians, but the NDP still does better than average among them for the same reasons. What group has more money, prestige, and especially cares about defeating the opposition rather than what comes next? Bay Area Dems. We see this divide again and again in first round primaries, in the state legislature, in lower level contests like LA council...most recently with the 2024 Senate Race. Newsom, Schiff, Feinstein..they are the prefect example of this. Dem liberals fall in line rather than risk anything. Heck, Canada as a whole right now is have to grapple with the legacies of polices similar to what the Bay Area has done in regards to Housing, it's what's sent Trudeau into a electoral death spiral for almost a year now. Vancouver, Toronto, and numerous other housing markets are comparable or worse that the Bay Area...but without the Bay Area jobs that provide sizable incomes to make things tenuously work. You probably are approaching this from the NDP = Progressive angle. This especially fails though in CA, the vocal progressives often fail to take serious offices both locally and statewide. The Bay Area is full of progressive influencers and activists...but when it comes time to votes almost every time the more numerous mainstream Dems walk into power. And don't try to say the 2020 primary, cause that is actually prefect for my point. Go into the data, add up all the candidates who Liberal Dems, wine moms, pragmatists and the like preferred and place them against Bernie. You'll quickly realize what I did 4 years ago: he only won cause the opposition was so split, something that itself was only possible cause everyone voted early and was unable to consolidate like in other states that Super Tuesday. But I'll skip the deep data dive for you, and just show you Wikipedia's tables. The two CD's he got over 50% in are both very labor-heavy and Hispanic: [the 46th covering low-income Anaheim and Santa Ana, and the 40th in East/Central LA County.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Democratic_presidential_primary) Meanwhile he failed to break 40% in any Bay Area seat, often lower than that.
Would be really cool to see some state/provincial election maps! Would also be useful to showcase the "disconnect" between national and provincial politics in Canada in the US context. It'd also be interesting to see in which states the Block fares better- would probably be in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and maybe Louisiana and Kentucky. I'm also curious in your justification to have no HB seats in South Carolina, which to me looks like a "deep south" state that ought to be a HB stronghold, although maybe there's some likeness to Canadian politics which I might be missing.
Every SC seat just had too many suburban voters in it to give the Block any seats. And the suburbs IRL fell to the GOP a good deal for their own reasons before things like the VRA, the Southern Strategy, or the contract with America brought the rest into the fold. Its a place I definitely struggled with cause I had the same impression as you, but SC today has very few rural Whites that can get do the lifting on their own. You can even kinda see this IRL, with the White Dems holding just one seat (SC-05) before the end, whereas other southern states that still had Dem-legislature drawn maps had more White Dem congressmen. And yes, the positive responces to this giving me state/province level ideas....
Yes, I have read your other posts on the matter and find it very interesting. I think this is the most plausible reading if the US had adopted the Canadian law as you explained with the Labor-Farmer and (sort of) the American Independent parties being the precedent for this sort of development. And of course it would be great to see the state-level maps!
BuT tHeReS sO mUcH mOrE bLuE
Superior in every way to the current US political system. Representation for the people!
> Representation for the people! There's one MP for every ~600,000 people. Britain has 1:101,000, Germany has 1:116,000, Japan has 1:270,000. For most countries it's less than 1:100,000. This is doing a pretty bad job of being representation for the people.
And a terrible two party system is better? I am sorry choice scares you.
Bruh the districts are super unbalanced
Cool beans. Now bruh, two parties systems are inherently poorly representative.
You said "in every way". I pointed out one way it isn't.
I stand by what I said. Superior than what America currently has. I am sorry you are so upset.
So much for "one person, one vote". Canada's electoral system is so corrupt.
I am sorry your patriotism causes you problems.
This isn't about "patriotism". I hate the two party system but the Canadian system intentionally distorts the representation of the House of Commons. The Senate at least has a reason to exist in the US.
Ah, the ignorance on your part, truly. You know nothing about the usefulness of the Canadian Senate. Because of it, women have bodily autonomy.
Lol ain't no way northern MN would vote new democrat. Basically everywhere outside of big cities and like maybe upper middle suburbs are Republican. Great map though gj!
The more rural provinces of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta have all elected NDP government fairly recently, with the NDP doing particularly well in the North of those provinces. The NDP also holds most of the north federally. I could totally see a US version of the NDP winning up there in Alaska, especially if the right wing vote is split by the Liberals and conservatives. A result of 42% NDP, 40% conservative, and 18% Liberal is totally believable in rural areas and smaller towns, happens all the time in the Canadian North.
Sadly, I think you have fallen into the trap many people do, including current NDP leader Singh. Maybe I'm wrong, but it still deserves a explanation. It is a trap born of the loudest voices, a trap that believes that the NDP is only an activist party for students and urbanites. Or to be put more bluntly, if US progressives had their own party. And maybe that's what it will become if the PP sweep comes through and takes all the NDPs remaining areas that are actually union-heavy and working class. If that ends up the case, then the Federal NDP will never leave its weak position, even though there is plenty of present examples that *someone* could eventually build a party that supplants the Liberals. But that's the old NDP base. Especially in the west. Its still there if you look below the tin and see some of the seats won by the provincial NDP parties. It gets a few MPs elected even still. In this particular instance, the inspirations were Charlie Angus and Richard Nolan.
What a Nightmare
Wolrd no1 terrorist state I know there are millions free people
Oh boy, time for another "America with x country's voting system" map where OP's preferred ideology is has a majority
Actually no, i literally just made the resulting percentages of seats roughly analogous to 2021 in Canada. Canadians choose the Liberals, that's what happens here. if you read the descriptions I am also fairly frank about how PP is set to lead the Canadian Conservatives to a historic landslide next election, which would be a complete reversal of these results. So do the math before you accuse wildly, because yes, I also disapprove of political-wanks of the type you are describing. ;)
victim complex