February 2, 2023
The report for redistribution in Québec has been released. Québec is the 2nd largest province and has 78 ridings with an average population/electoral district of 108,998, just above the national average. Québec was meant to lose 1 seat bringing them down to 77 with the seat allocation made by the Chief Electoral Officer. This outraged Québecers, particularly the Bloc Québécois who introduced a motion to change how seats are apportioned which passed. Later, the Government tabled legislation that would amend the Grandfather Clause of the Constitution so that no province could have fewer seats than it did in 2012's redistribution meaning that Québec could not lose a seat as originally planned. Québec has easily had to most contentious boundary redistribution so it's led to the commission playing things extremely safe.
Proposals
Unlike my other posts covering redistribution, as Québec is such a large province I will not cover every or nearly every change in their proposals or report.
Arguably the most significant change was the shift in how many seats are allocated to each general region of Quebec. The commission decided to account for the significant increase in population northwest of Montreal by creating a riding named Les Pays-D'en-Haut covering the Regional Municipality with the same name and some larger towns along the Rivière du Nord.
To account for this new riding in this area of the province, despite the overall number of seats staying at 78, they had to mash up the Gaspé Peninsula and Bas-Saint-Laurent much to the discontent of the Liberal Cabinet Minister who represents the tip of the Gaspé and Magdalen Islands and the Bloc MP next to her who's riding got completely sliced in half between the 2 new ridings.
The other major shift of note was in the Lac-Saint-Jean and Saguenay regions. The riding of Chicoutimi-Le Fjord got a facelift, absorbing much of the area north of Saguenay. To account for this shift in population from Jonquière to Chicoutimi-Le Fjord, Jonquière had to take a massive bite of Lac-Saint-Jean taking much of the interior of the north of the riding leaving the direct lakeshore and the little populated areas left in Lac-Saint-Jean.
The major shift from the commission which differed from every other was the sweeping inclusion of indigenous names in the ridings.
Report
The report had a large return to the current borders while also pairing some ridings that had a few towns flipping between them. I think this was largely done because of how contentious this map already was and people approved of their current electoral districts.
From people that I've talked to about this map, it's generally an acceptable map with no major issues.
The major shifts happened in the Lac-Saint-Jean region where a proposal to the commission was used as a map and it's quite a solid map.
Another major shift was the weird stealing of different areas in the Gaspé, particularly the Matapédia Valley.
The last major shift has some people suspicious of this map because of a potential political impact on the map. I haven't talked about Montreal in this article because it barely changed but a random decision took place in Laurier-Sainte-Marie that shifted some of the borders with its neighbours. The current riding (outlined in black) is one of the closest in the province for the NDP to get a 2nd seat. The proposal (outlined in purple) had essentially no change apart from a border shift in the northeast. The report on the other hand had it gaining a massive amount of land around the ports near the bottom right of the photo. The areas the riding lost in the top left of the photo are some of the NDP's best-performing areas while the ports and Old Montreal are strong for the Liberals. Some people have been questioning potential political interference in the commission since this shift wasn't seen in the proposal.
Political Impact
No major shifts from 2019 to 2021 and with the new borders took place. The only major difference was the change in the Gaspé with the removal of one of the safest Bloc Québécois seats causing its neighbours to get increased percentages for the party. As stated above in the previous section, Laurier-Sainte-Marie got much more Liberal and much less NDP. Overall, the map didn't have a large effect on the election results using the proposal and report
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