There is a circle icon with arrows at the end of the publication in your email or at the top of the publication in the app. Click it and it will ask if you just want to restack or add a note and restack. Just restack.
Oh wow. Things are so different in Canada. So up this way there is district (we call them “ridings”) restructuring every ten years or so. As I understand it, in the United States, that question is answered, in most states, by politicians — the very people with the greatest stake in the outcome. In Canada, it is answered differently. Understanding that difference tells us something important not only about the two countries' electoral systems, but about two distinct visions of what democratic governance is actually for.
In the U.S. drawing electoral boundaries to favour one party over another has since become a sophisticated, data-driven science in the United States, where voters can be sorted by party affiliation, racial composition, income other variables, producing districts engineered to deliver predetermined outcomes. To a Canadian, certainly, but I know to some Americans as well, it seems batshit crazy that politicians select voters as opposed to other way around.
Here, t the federal level, in 1964, Parliament established independent electoral boundaries commissions to take the task of redistricting out of politicians' hands entirely. Every ten years, following a national census (we have just started one) ten provincial commissions are struck — one per province — each chaired by a sitting judge and joined by two additional members appointed by the Speaker of the House of Commons. These commissioners are usually judges, academics, or researchers, but definitely not active party members. They do not owe their appointments to the government of the day in any direct sense, and they do not answer to it when drawing their maps.
The primary criterion is population equality, no mean feat in a country where there are vast areas with relatively few folks, and small areas where bunches of us live in close proximity. Here each riding should contain roughly the same number of residents, with a permitted variance of plus or minus twenty-five percent to accommodate geographic realities — the sheer physical scale of northern and rural ridings makes perfect numerical equality impractical. Beyond population, the commissions does consider communities of interest, historical boundaries, and the need for manageable geographic size. Members of Parliament may make submissions and voice concerns, but they hold no final authority. The map, when it is drawn, belongs to the commission, not to the governing party.
Canada's commissions use no data on party affiliation for redistricting purposes, in part because Canada has no system of voter registration by party. There is simply no mechanism by which a Canadian federal commission could engineer a partisan outcome even if it wished to, because the raw material of American-style gerrymandering — detailed, precinct-level party registration data — does not exist in the Canadian context.
Look, our system ain’t perfect, and perhaps none can be, but this is one more area where I think American exceptionalism gets in the way of a massive rethink of how things are done. I say this respectfully, although pointing out to those Americans (they tend to live in the red regions of your country and voted for the Orange One) who go into utter shock when learning that we don’t want to be the fifty-first state. I’m very happy that we don’t gerrymander at the federal level. I am less satisfied with the electoral system that the fairly drawn boundaries serve. Canada uses First Past the Post voting — a system in which the candidate with the most votes in a riding wins, regardless of whether that candidate secured a majority, and in which votes cast for losing candidates contribute nothing to the ultimate distribution of seats in Parliament. In a two-party system, this produces rough-and-ready results that are, if not mathematically precise, at least broadly representative. In a multi-party system — which Canada emphatically has — it produces outcomes that can diverge sharply from the actual distribution of voter preference across the country. I would love to vote for the socialist New Democratic Party but in riding they have no chance at all so I hold my nose and vote Liberal (which does not live up to its name) to stave off the Progressive Conservatives (ditto…progressive they ain’t).
And so party that wins thirty-eight percent of the national vote, distributed efficiently across enough ridings, can form a majority government. A party that wins fifteen percent of the vote, concentrated in the wrong places, may hold a handful of seats or none at all. Millions of votes, cast in good conscience by citizens doing their democratic duty, simply evaporate. The map may be fairly drawn, but the system built on top of it can still distort the popular will beyond recognition. It urinates me off that were I to vote with my heart, it would be meaningless where I live (my federal Member of Parliament is Liberal, and I did vote for her, but her party was not my favorite one). Proportional representation — in any of its several workable variants — addresses this structural distortion directly.
The United States is a great and consequential democracy, with institutions and traditions that command genuine respect. But it is a democracy that permits the systematic manipulation of electoral geography for partisan gain, that has watched its Supreme Court decline to impose federal limits on partisan gerrymandering, and that is increasingly unable to guarantee that the composition of its legislatures bears more than an approximate relationship to the preferences of its voters. These are not trivial problems. They are structural failures that have contributed, over decades, to political dysfunction, minority rule, and a justified erosion of public confidence in democratic institutions.
Canada's federal system is not perfect. Its electoral system, in my view, is not even particularly good. But it does not allow politicians to draw the maps that determine their own electoral fate. It does not sort voters by party affiliation, and certainly not by something so absurdly trivial as skin colour, and so does not, can not, engineer outcomes before a single ballot is cast. It rests, in this one important respect, on the principle that a democracy's rules should be made by those with no stake in the outcome — a principle that, once lost, is exceedingly difficult to recover. That is not a small thing. And it is, among many other things, why Canada is Canada, and prefers to remain so. Sorry for the rant. I have to go and arrange some sea shells...happily I enjoy the freedom to do so, and sip some good Cuban rum whilst so involved.
I depend on your briefs for your perspective and your sources for additional reading... some days I get too saturated too quickly and I just can't read more... not that I don't want to, but my pea brain wanders off too much! Wishing you a beautiful week and thank you.
Oh, I've been meaning to ask, how do I restack? I've never done that before and I know it can be valuable to writers here on substack... sorry, I've searched substack articles looking for the how-to and can't find anything... see what I mean about pea brain?!!
Here are 2 articles - popular information and SF Chronicle - which really make clear what's happening to the HUMAN BEINGS being "detained" by our government! Very little publicity from any "msm"! People who have been here for most of their lives!
You may have been well aware of this, but possibly some others arent.
I had heard bits & pieces but after reading the SF Chronicle post about the individual stories - it just makes me sick. And of course with the Iran mess, noone seems to be paying attention.
There is a circle icon with arrows at the end of the publication in your email or at the top of the publication in the app. Click it and it will ask if you just want to restack or add a note and restack. Just restack.
Oh wow. Things are so different in Canada. So up this way there is district (we call them “ridings”) restructuring every ten years or so. As I understand it, in the United States, that question is answered, in most states, by politicians — the very people with the greatest stake in the outcome. In Canada, it is answered differently. Understanding that difference tells us something important not only about the two countries' electoral systems, but about two distinct visions of what democratic governance is actually for.
In the U.S. drawing electoral boundaries to favour one party over another has since become a sophisticated, data-driven science in the United States, where voters can be sorted by party affiliation, racial composition, income other variables, producing districts engineered to deliver predetermined outcomes. To a Canadian, certainly, but I know to some Americans as well, it seems batshit crazy that politicians select voters as opposed to other way around.
Here, t the federal level, in 1964, Parliament established independent electoral boundaries commissions to take the task of redistricting out of politicians' hands entirely. Every ten years, following a national census (we have just started one) ten provincial commissions are struck — one per province — each chaired by a sitting judge and joined by two additional members appointed by the Speaker of the House of Commons. These commissioners are usually judges, academics, or researchers, but definitely not active party members. They do not owe their appointments to the government of the day in any direct sense, and they do not answer to it when drawing their maps.
The primary criterion is population equality, no mean feat in a country where there are vast areas with relatively few folks, and small areas where bunches of us live in close proximity. Here each riding should contain roughly the same number of residents, with a permitted variance of plus or minus twenty-five percent to accommodate geographic realities — the sheer physical scale of northern and rural ridings makes perfect numerical equality impractical. Beyond population, the commissions does consider communities of interest, historical boundaries, and the need for manageable geographic size. Members of Parliament may make submissions and voice concerns, but they hold no final authority. The map, when it is drawn, belongs to the commission, not to the governing party.
Canada's commissions use no data on party affiliation for redistricting purposes, in part because Canada has no system of voter registration by party. There is simply no mechanism by which a Canadian federal commission could engineer a partisan outcome even if it wished to, because the raw material of American-style gerrymandering — detailed, precinct-level party registration data — does not exist in the Canadian context.
Look, our system ain’t perfect, and perhaps none can be, but this is one more area where I think American exceptionalism gets in the way of a massive rethink of how things are done. I say this respectfully, although pointing out to those Americans (they tend to live in the red regions of your country and voted for the Orange One) who go into utter shock when learning that we don’t want to be the fifty-first state. I’m very happy that we don’t gerrymander at the federal level. I am less satisfied with the electoral system that the fairly drawn boundaries serve. Canada uses First Past the Post voting — a system in which the candidate with the most votes in a riding wins, regardless of whether that candidate secured a majority, and in which votes cast for losing candidates contribute nothing to the ultimate distribution of seats in Parliament. In a two-party system, this produces rough-and-ready results that are, if not mathematically precise, at least broadly representative. In a multi-party system — which Canada emphatically has — it produces outcomes that can diverge sharply from the actual distribution of voter preference across the country. I would love to vote for the socialist New Democratic Party but in riding they have no chance at all so I hold my nose and vote Liberal (which does not live up to its name) to stave off the Progressive Conservatives (ditto…progressive they ain’t).
And so party that wins thirty-eight percent of the national vote, distributed efficiently across enough ridings, can form a majority government. A party that wins fifteen percent of the vote, concentrated in the wrong places, may hold a handful of seats or none at all. Millions of votes, cast in good conscience by citizens doing their democratic duty, simply evaporate. The map may be fairly drawn, but the system built on top of it can still distort the popular will beyond recognition. It urinates me off that were I to vote with my heart, it would be meaningless where I live (my federal Member of Parliament is Liberal, and I did vote for her, but her party was not my favorite one). Proportional representation — in any of its several workable variants — addresses this structural distortion directly.
The United States is a great and consequential democracy, with institutions and traditions that command genuine respect. But it is a democracy that permits the systematic manipulation of electoral geography for partisan gain, that has watched its Supreme Court decline to impose federal limits on partisan gerrymandering, and that is increasingly unable to guarantee that the composition of its legislatures bears more than an approximate relationship to the preferences of its voters. These are not trivial problems. They are structural failures that have contributed, over decades, to political dysfunction, minority rule, and a justified erosion of public confidence in democratic institutions.
Canada's federal system is not perfect. Its electoral system, in my view, is not even particularly good. But it does not allow politicians to draw the maps that determine their own electoral fate. It does not sort voters by party affiliation, and certainly not by something so absurdly trivial as skin colour, and so does not, can not, engineer outcomes before a single ballot is cast. It rests, in this one important respect, on the principle that a democracy's rules should be made by those with no stake in the outcome — a principle that, once lost, is exceedingly difficult to recover. That is not a small thing. And it is, among many other things, why Canada is Canada, and prefers to remain so. Sorry for the rant. I have to go and arrange some sea shells...happily I enjoy the freedom to do so, and sip some good Cuban rum whilst so involved.
I depend on your briefs for your perspective and your sources for additional reading... some days I get too saturated too quickly and I just can't read more... not that I don't want to, but my pea brain wanders off too much! Wishing you a beautiful week and thank you.
Thank you for this and know that even if you just read the TLDR you are giving me encouragement to carry on this operation.
Oh, I've been meaning to ask, how do I restack? I've never done that before and I know it can be valuable to writers here on substack... sorry, I've searched substack articles looking for the how-to and can't find anything... see what I mean about pea brain?!!
Here are 2 articles - popular information and SF Chronicle - which really make clear what's happening to the HUMAN BEINGS being "detained" by our government! Very little publicity from any "msm"! People who have been here for most of their lives!
https://popular.info/p/ice-has-not-paid-for-detainee-medical
https://archive.ph/SlE8U
Thank you for this.
You may have been well aware of this, but possibly some others arent.
I had heard bits & pieces but after reading the SF Chronicle post about the individual stories - it just makes me sick. And of course with the Iran mess, noone seems to be paying attention.