(Re)creating Boundary Lines

The ward boundary review raised significant questions about the regularity by which such reviews should be held, the role of city councillors as participants and decision-makers in the process, and the relationship between the WBR and a future governance review. [...] The province’s chief justice appoints a judge to chair the commission, and the Speaker of the House of Commons appoints the other two members from among the province’s residents. [...] The process is set out in the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act (1985), which was introduced to address problems associated with electoral redistribution in Canada, such as the tendency for the exercise to be overly partisan and the frequent discrepancies in the geographic size and population of constituencies at the federal level (Canadian Urban Institute et al. [...] The OMB has applied the Carter decision to evaluate the effectiveness of representation based on the following factors, referred to as the Carter criteria: • Does it equitably distribute the population and the electors? [...] The OMB sided with the appellant (although the decision rested largely on the lack of inclusion of postsecondary students and the inclusion of non-voters in population counts when determining electoral districts), and amended the bylaw to account for the Sydenham Neighbourhood Association (Canadian Urban Institute et al.