Here's a guest opinion that recently ran on the editorial pages of a newspaper I once delivered, Charlotteotown, PEI's, The Guardian - which covers my native province like the dew every morning. I thought it need some good coverage on the violations of Charter democratic rights that are taken for granted by many political elites.

Looking past the politics of electoral boundaries

By Mark Greenan
Guest Opinion

The top story in The Guardian May 5 informs Islanders that “P.E.I. politicians threw out a political map … painstakingly put together by an independent commission” and will ask Elections P.E.I. to draft new boundaries.
The decision by a legislative committee composed solely of PC MLAs (the Liberals wisely boycotted the unnecessary committee) and chaired by Agriculture Minister Jim Bagnall will likely mean that P.E.I.’s electoral map will be again going before the courts to see if it is permissible under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. My opinion, based upon Canadian election law, is that any new map will quite likely be thrown out by the courts — all at taxpayer expense of course.
The Guardian story informs us that Bagnall trusts Elections P.E.I. to ensure that any boundaries “keep communities of interest together.”
I must admit I’m puzzled by his comments. The superb 2004 report prepared by the Commission on Electoral Boundaries, chaired by Justice John A. McQuaid of the P.E.I. Supreme Court, looked at Canadian election law and drew its map based upon 14 principles and facts of which one was ‘community of interest’. The commissioners identify three distinct communities of interest — urban Islanders, rural Islanders and the Acadian community of ‘la Région Evangeline’. The map they propose represents all three of those groups fairly, for the 56 per cent of Islanders living in rural areas are a significant majority in an identical proportion of seats — 15 of the 27 districts in the new map. Inversely, the communities of Cornwall, Stratford, Summerside and Charlottetown are the majority in 12 districts. Also, there is a district in West Prince, the smallest in the proposed map, where francophone voters are in the majority.
Does Bagnall mean that the boundaries don’t keep specific communities of interest together? Surely, he is aware that all districts in the new map are centred on a “family of schools” and that the McQuaid commission already made seven specific boundary changes in response to public input — over 100 oral or written submissions — on a draft electoral map made public in the summer of 2004. If there are only a few small changes that particular communities are demanding, let the government explain what they are publicly and make the changes quickly.
But as readers of the McQuaid report should know, electoral boundaries cannot be drawn to favour rural voters. In the Island case — the continued over-representation of voters west of Summerside and in eastern P.E.I. — cannot continue. To say otherwise is to grossly misinterpret previous court cases on voting rights and electoral boundaries from both Island and Canadian courts.
As the McQuaid report clearly explains “the courts have (never) accepted that the purpose of the variance of plus or minus 25 per cent is to allow for the over-representation of citizens who live outside the four large municipalities. In our respectful opinion if this was the intent of the legislature, if this is the purpose of the variance and if this is the plain meaning of the section, it is unconstitutional.”
It should also be noted that since such a court case would deal with the democratic rights under section 3 of the charter they cannot be overridden by the ‘notwithstanding clause’.
To put it another way, any map that does not have seven seats for Charlottetown, three seats for Summerside, one each for Cornwall and Stratford will be thrown out by the courts.
Of course, this also means that western and eastern P.E.I. must each lose a seat due to their population decline over the past decade (and only fair, considering ridings in those areas were among the least populated when the current map was drafted 12 years ago).
Perhaps the fact that this means a government MLA in West Prince and Kings County will each see their seat migrate to suburban areas that have been more fertile territory for the Liberals in recent elections is really the interest at stake in this issue.
As Canadian political scientist and expert on electoral boundary law John Courtenay has written, “sometimes what is claimed as a community of interest is, in fact, nothing more than barely disguised political self-interest on the part of a politician or a highly parochial understanding of the concept on the part of interested members of the public.”
I would recommend to Elections P.E.I. that it respectfully decline to amend the boundaries proposed in the McQuaid report. To do otherwise would seriously compromise its perceived neutrality, particularly considering the Official Opposition’s clearly expressed objections to revising the independent commission’s report. There is no other province in Canada where the boundaries are not de facto set by a publicly accessible commission independent of government — all Island voters deserve no less.

Mark Greenan, a native of Summerside , is a master of arts candidate in political science at the University of Ottawa