Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
The rural attitude is toxic. I don't know how this view is evolving but seats will be redistributed to the middle of the province eventually. Cape Breton has/had a terrible political culture with people boasting about how much they'd get in equalization money if they separated, due to their economy being so horrible. NS needs to invest in productive areas and focus on improving competitiveness. That will create more for the rural areas in the long run.
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When the province redrew ridings in 2019, the commission charged with making recommendations specifically recommended that rural areas be overrepresented in order to counterbalance the weight of HRM's growing influence.
Even now, the province is considering
adding a fourth Acadian riding, by cutting Inverness in two. The funny thing is that Inverness currently has exactly the average number of electors. Slicing and dicing it to create an Acadian riding would result in two starkly undersized ridings, just like the three existing Acadian ridings (Clare, Argyle and Richmond), which are the smallest in the province, with between 6,800 and 8,000 electors each, based on 2021 census numbers. (The average number of electors per riding was just over 14,000.)
This is despite the fact that HRM-area ridings are actually among the most underpresented, with Halifax Citadel-Sable Island and Halifax Needham closing in on 18,000 electors, and Cole Harbour-Dartmouth nor far behind. Given that the province has added more than 100,000 people since then, almost all of whom have moved to HRM, it's insane that anyone is thinking about adding more rural ridings, and to provide representation to the most overrpresented constituency in the province. I have nothing against Acadians, but come on.
I think it is probably inevitable that the province will have to afford more weight to HRM, and I'd like to think it will be the 2026 census numbers that could do it, since they'll definitely show a noticeable urban shift in the population distribution. But I think it will take at least another census cycle, because there's no way the province is going to create a situation where urban voters are even marginally overrepresented--despite that we have rural ridings that are effectively half of what a riding should be, population-wise.
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