As Parliament rises for the summer, MPs fan out to spend time in their ridings, listening to constituents, eating burgers and being accountable. That’s the theory, anyway.
The riding is so much a part of our democratic system that we don’t stop to think about whether geography is the best way to organize representation in our federal government.
Regional representation is so sacred that it even trumps the principle that every individual should have equal say, both in Parliament and in political parties.
In both houses of Parliament, regional representation confers legitimacy. Residency requirements in the Senate have been in the news, reinforcing Canadians’ expectations that senators be “from” a certain part of Canada, while they work much of the year in Ottawa.
This expectation is somewhat paradoxical and impractical, and leads to debates about the meaning of “primary residence.”
The geographic model has its roots in a time when a Parliament was an event, when place played a big role in defining communities of interest, when civic engagement was rooted in property ownership.
It assumes a society in which the citizen lives, works and cares for family mainly in one area, and sends a community representative to a moot once in a while to discuss a few issues of common concern, such as whether the monarch ought to be able to raise taxes or declare war.
In 2013, the question “where are you from?” is not so simple. I’ve lived a fairly ordinary Canadian life that took me from Kitchener-Waterloo to the shores of Lake Superior and to small-town Manitoba and to Ottawa, where I’ve lived in four different ridings, urban, suburban and rural.
What I expect from my federal politicians has not changed much, if at all, with each of those moves.
Even the interests of a single household at one moment in time can have little relationship to the riding system. I live in one riding and work in a second; my spouse works in a third; our son attends preschool in a fourth.
Include just my parents, mother-in-law and siblings, and my small family covers four more ridings, from Vancouver Island to a mining community in northern Manitoba.
Many Canadians cross riding boundaries every day, and what they think of, say, the F-35s or mandatory minimum sentences, is not bound up with the narrow interests of the piece of property where they lay their heads at night. Their communities of interest are networks, and are likely to exist, in part, online.
At the federal level, ridings are just a way to organize us into groups for the purposes of elections and interaction. Maybe it’s the best way to organize us; maybe not. It’s certainly not the only way and it’s certainly not perfect.
I’d much rather be represented in the House of Commons by a politician whose platform I support than a politician who happens to live near my house.
Provincially and municipally, geographic representation makes sense. The people who live in an area should decide what happens to the roads and schools there. Federalism assigns local concerns to the provinces and municipalities. MPs and senators do get involved in local concerns now, for political reasons, but our system doesn’t require that.
I realize that doing away with national geographic representation would have enormous consequences, both practically and politically. I’m not suggesting we blow up our system overnight. Nobody would listen if I did, anyway.
But maybe, over the course of this 21st century, we can start to relax our old-fashioned emphasis on regional representation just a little, especially when it clashes with representation by population at the national level.
And it’s something to consider if the day ever comes when we have those long-threatened national conversations about Senate or electoral reform.
