Commissioned Ridings: Designing Canada's Electoral Districts

Where did the idea for nonpartisan constituency redistributions come from? What were the principal reasons that Canada turned to arm's-length commissions to design its electoral districts? In Commissioned Ridings John Courtney addresses these questions by examining and assessing the readjustment process in Canada's electoral boundaries. Defining electoral districts as "representational building blocks," Courtney compares federal and provincial electoral readjustments in the last half of the twentieth century, showing how parliamentarians and legislators, boundary commissions, courts, and interested members of the general public debated representational principles to define the purposes of electoral redistricting in an increasingly urban, ethnically mixed federal state such as Canada.