Fairness

  1. It seems undemocratic for voters in other ridings to vote for my MP.

    Local PR has a different mind-set than First-Past-The-Post. In FPTP the voters in the riding select the MP for their riding. So only those that voted for the MP have full political representation. In Local PR the voters in the region select the MPs for the region as a whole. Most voters will now have two MPs to turn to. Their local MP will still be their constituent MP for matters such as passports, immigration, and more generally dealing with federal red tape. At the same time, most voters will now have a policy representative MP in their region more in accord with their own political persuasion.

  2. My riding elected an NDP candidate but surrounding ridings all went Conservative. Will we keep our NDP MP if these ridings form a region?

    Short answer: yes

    Longer answer: Let’s make the question a bit more interesting – “We almost elected an NDP MP in our riding but got trounced by Conservatives in neighbouring ridings. If these ridings are grouped into a region, what happens?”

    Let’s make some assumptions: there are four ridings, each with 1001 possible voters. First choice votes were as follows:

    PartyRiding ARiding BRiding CRiding D
    Con40605555
    Lib25252521
    NDP35152024

    Quota, the number of votes that guarantees the election of a candidate, is 1⁄5*v + 1 or 1⁄5*400 + 1 or 81 votes.

    Finally, let’s assume that second choice votes for NDP voters go to Riding A.

    The NDP candidates in Riding B and C are dropped first and transfer to A, giving a total of 35 + 15 + 20 = 70. The Liberal in Riding D drops next. Assume they also transfer to Riding A, but 46 is not enough for the Liberal there to win.

    When the NDP candidate in Riding D is dropped and those votes transfer to Riding A giving more than 81 votes and that NDP candidate will be elected.

    1 For more realistic numbers, just multiply all the numbers by 1,000. It doesn't affect the results.

  3. Can an urban riding with lots of voters swamp the vote of rural riding in the same region?

    This question has a faulty premise: that urban ridings have more voters than rural ridings.
    It does happen, but it’s rare. Part of the mandate of the current Electoral Boundaries Commissions is to make sure that ridings are all approximately the same size as the average riding within the province. Without a large difference in population, it’s hard to see how one riding could manipulate the outcome in another without hurting themselves.