Out in Left-Centre Field

The first in an ongoing series.

If you’ve been around the Canadian Youth Assembly’s website or forums anytime lately, I’d bet anything you’ve seen mention of this “177 riding” arrangement being adopted by the CYA. I don’t fault you if you’re still confused as to what it is or how it was created.

Read on, then; your answers are finally nigh. (It’ll take me a few issues, but the more thorough, the better, eh?)

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So, you ask, how did this new system come about?

Well, its primary raison d’ètre is simple: the CYA, being a new and still-developing organization, needs to save money. One of the big ways in which this is possible is by cutting down on the financial requirement needed to elect and support Youth Representatives in the Assembly. That means having fewer members than the 308 which constitute the real House of Commons. The trouble with that endeavour is that there needs to be a substantial reduction while still retaining adequate regional representation; it’s a tricky balancing act, as you will see.

Possibly an even greater problem is getting everybody to agree on an arrangement. I was late in coming to the CYA’s Gradual Growth Committee board; when I was granted access back in December, what I could immediately gather was that nothing comprehensive had been done. Oh, there had been some calculations based on nice, round 50/100/150/200/250-seat targets, but none of the province-specific discussions had ever come to any sort of conclusion, nor made a real effort to follow one of those targets or some unified system. Everything was all over the map (literally), and the board was pretty much dead.

So what to do? It was the Christmas break, I was done my exams, and I needed something fun to challenge my mind. (Yes, “fun.” I’m in engineering. To me, basic math like this is fun.) So, I thought, why not work upwards from the numbers of youth in each province instead of adopting a target? Could a fair and unified system be found to that allocate seats to each province? Steven Heidel, the CYA’s Elections Coordinator, had posted a breakdown of percentages of youth in each province in the calculations thread:

NL: 0.0182894586
PE: 0.0047279466
NS: 0.0294165332
NB: 0.0243019700
QC: 0.2368288461
ON: 0.3711107619
MB: 0.0382326384
SK: 0.0359777907
AB: 0.1092728116
BC: 0.1282931003
YK: 0.0009802601
NT: 0.0014092798
NU: 0.0011610969

Little did I know those numbers were from 2004 and were unreliable; but I’ll touch on that later. So, where to start? I decided to divide all the various jurisdictions by the smallest youth population (the Yukon), and got this:

Newfoundland: 19
PEI: 5
Nova Scotia: 30
New Brunswick: 25
Quebec: 242
Ontario: 379
Manitoba: 39
Saskatchewan: 37
Alberta: 111
British Columbia: 131
Yukon: 1
NWT: 1
Nunavut: 1

… which yielded a total of 1021 ridings, which is actually way more than the original 308, and which clearly won’t work. So, then, I decided to discard the territories (as they were all going to come up with similar results), forcing them to have 1 seat each, and decided to try dividing everybody by the smallest province, Prince Edward Island:

Newfoundland: 4
PEI: 1
Nova Scotia: 6
New Brunswick: 5
Quebec: 50
Ontario: 78
Manitoba: 8
Saskatchewan: 8
Alberta: 23
British Columbia: 27
Yukon: 1
NWT: 1
Nunavut: 1

… which gave a total of 213 ridings – much better than over a thousand. Still, it wasn’t quite what I was looking for; so, I thought, how about dividing everybody by half of Newfoundland & Labrador (because of its geographical split)? The result:

Newfoundland: 2
PEI: 1
Nova Scotia: 3
New Brunswick: 3
Quebec: 26
Ontario: 41
Manitoba: 4
Saskatchewan: 4
Alberta: 12
British Columbia: 14
Yukon: 1
NWT: 1
Nunavut: 1

… for a total of 113 this time. However, this seemed a little too low; the combinations might be a more than a little painful. (Most of Quebec as triple ridings? No way.) Maybe the answer lay somewhere in between. With that in mind, I decided to try dividing everybody by one-third of the youth population of Newfoundland & Labrador, with this result:

Newfoundland: 3
PEI: 1
Nova Scotia: 5
New Brunswick: 4
Quebec: 39
Ontario: 61
Manitoba: 6
Saskatchewan: 6
Alberta: 18
British Columbia: 21
Yukon: 1
NWT: 1
Nunavut: 1

… for a total of 167 ridings! This seems like the best balance so far, no? I thought so, too. In fact, the calculated numbers were pretty close to whole numbers of seats even before rounding. So I adopted this framework and moved to the step of going through each of the provinces’ ridings to combine them into their respective allocations. I used the CBC’s online map of the 2008 federal election results as both a visual and a naming resource, as I wanted everything to make geographic sense. I decided to stick to the following guidelines as I worked:

• Party standings in individual ridings would have no bearing on combinations;
• As in real life, no ridings would cross provincial/territorial boundaries;
• Geographical area of the ridings would be taken into account, in addition to the potential numbers of youth in the riding;
• Combined ridings would have to border one another to form contiguous areas;
• The urban/rural balance would need to be maintained, as much as reasonably possible;
• I would rather have more double ridings, instead of triple/quadruple ridings, given the difficulty in representing more youth or more area;
• Reuniting split communities would be a secondary goal, where possible;
• No real-life ridings would be split.

After I had created a preliminary (i.e. draft) combination system for the ridings, I presented my idea to the Gradual Growth Committee. Cue the suggestions, the feedback, and the nitpicking – fun times! This is where Immanuel Giulea of the AYCC came in: he had the keen idea of going through the 2006 Census data for each riding and compiling the number of youth in each riding who were between ages 15 and 24, as a means of checking and validating my combinations. In doing so, he found a key error: Steven’s numbers had been from 2004, while the more comprehensive, useful, and reliable census data was from 2006. This meant we had to do everything again.

In order to extrapolate the numbers of youth ages 14 through 24 in each province in 2009, Immanuel went through the numbers for ages 11 through 21 in the 2006 census, added them up for each province and territory, and then found what percentage each province and territory had out of the whole youth population for that age range. We now had new initial proportions:

NL: 0.0152626350 (down)
PE: 0.0045559625 (down)
NS: 0.0279895355 (down)
NB: 0.0220135189 (down)
QC: 0.2249472972 (down)
ON: 0.3903970043 (up)
MB: 0.0391924232 (up)
SK: 0.0341016630 (down)
AB: 0.1112025662 (up)
BC: 0.1261994099 (down)
YK: 0.0010352999 (up)
NT: 0.0016429759 (up)
NU: 0.0014597085 (up)

… which, as you can see on close inspection, are somewhat different from the first set (nothing drastic, though), resulting in a different distribution of seats. Immanuel suggested keeping Quebec’s existing figure of 39 ridings and working out all of the other provinces and territories accordingly. The new result (and the one we finally settled on) is as follows:

Newfoundland: 3
PEI: 1
Nova Scotia: 5
New Brunswick: 4
Quebec: 39
Ontario: 68 (gained 7)
Manitoba: 7 (gained 1)
Saskatchewan: 6
Alberta: 19 (gained 1)
British Columbia: 22 (gained 1)
Yukon: 1
NWT: 1
Nunavut: 1

The correction had added 10 ridings, for a grand total of the 177 you see today. With the new breathing room, I was able to split up several ridings that were either geographically huge or were known to have a high youth population. Fortunately, however, a lot of issues with the combinations and naming had been resolved by that point; as a result, only a few small tweaks followed before none of the CYA members on the forums had anything left to bring forward. Next up were Tyler and his staff; I wasn’t sure how they’d like it but I was pleased to hear that it passed the Board of Directors without complaint. Yay for progress!

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(I realize that this overview doesn’t really cover the specific riding combinations in order – that’s why it’s an “overview.” Next up is in-depth coverage of each region of the country, one after another. Stay tuned!)