Regrettably, I was in Vancouver last week. It's a place I'm forced to visit from time to time in order to see my former schoolmates, given that we all went to university in the Lower Mainland. During my time there, I got into more than one argument with your run of the mill bike-lane loving, anti-Enbridge barista from Van City. And while those arguments are always frivolous, both because my point is always the correct one and because brush-cut baristas don't vote for Stephen Harper, I managed to get a few heads scratching when I said that representation by population isn't as fair as it sounds.
Looking at the electoral district maps of both the provincial and federal government brings home some stark realities about the problems with a purely mathematical formula for representation. From Port Coquitlam to Stanley Park and UBC, there are 20 ridings out of 85 at the provincial level and nine ridings out of 36 at the federal level. By comparison, the corridor between Mackenzie and Hope contains six out of 85 at the provincial level, and four out of 36 at the Federal level.
What grates me about these figures is that less than one percent of this province's landmass has a great deal of say over matters that affect the rest of British Columbia. And while we may all be residents of the Most Beautiful Place on Earth, our concerns become exponentially different in correlation to the distance one lives from a Skytrain station.
I'm almost certain the citizens of Lac la Hache couldn't care one iota about the Carbon Trust, and people in Williams Lake are going to continue having rodeos despite the protests that go on in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery; yet at the ballot box, people who live within long-boarding distance of one another and believe that meat is murder, have more representation than those who actually have to pay the difference at the pump or raise cattle for a living.
Obviously, representation by population is a core democratic principle, and one would be a fool to reject it. But the flipside of representation by population is the fact that the fathers of Confederation probably never dreamed that cities would someday swell to be the size of small European countries and begin dictating terms from unassailable, though "democratic", thrones to those of us who live in the "hinterland".
What is the answer to this new reality in parliamentary democracy? That's simple: get Vancouverites to form a city-state.
There are city states all over the world that work in tandem with national and provincial or state governments, usually for special economic privileges. This being the 21st century, why can't there be city states that are formed over particular social issues and taxation regimes? There won't be any border gates or guards of course, just some new signs that say "Welcome to the Free City of Vancouver - please leave all non-organic food products with friends in Surrey, Langley, or Pitt Meadows".
Given what Vancouver thinks of itself, I would be happy to see it give this project a whirl. It could truly lead to some incredibly creative and productive results.
But until that happens, the point I was making for these hipsters down south is that public discourse in this province has become so divergent that we don't really speak the same language anymore, let alone hold the same values. Thus, our now ancient credo of "rep by pop" is lending more help to special interests than it is to the average citizen.
In short, I think many people in rural BC are happy to share this beautiful province with the most ill-informed part of it - we're just tired of paying for their lack of common sense.
