Small-town mayors question plans to redraw electoral boundaries in B.C.'s Interior

Plans to redraw provincial electoral boundaries in B.C.'s Interior are causing concern for mayors of small communities affected by the proposal. 

Clearwater Mayor Merlin Blackwell attended a public consultation organized by the B.C. Electoral Boundaries Commission in Kamloops on Tuesday, and said he questions a preliminary report suggesting his community be split from the current Kamloops-North Thompson riding and moved into a redrawn Cariboo-North Thompson riding.

Clearwater is located 123 kilometres north of Kamloops, and residents depend on the larger city for many of their needs. The new plan would place them in the same electoral district as the Cariboo region, where they have few connections.

"Business or medical or school … everything that we basically do happens on Highway 5 and flows back into Kamloops," Blackwell said.

"We really do need to be represented by a Kamloops-anchored riding."

Barriere, just 64 kilometres north of Kamloops, as well as the nearby Simpcw First Nation, would also be included in the new riding, which includes communities like Williams Lake and Anahim Lake — more than 500 kilometres from Barriere.

Barriere Mayor Ward Stamer said he questions the ability of any elected representative to cover every community in the proposed new riding.

"From the tip of our [new] riding to Anahim Lake is seven hours in good weather," Stamer said. "How is an MLA going to be able to adequately represent that stretch of an area unless they give them a helicopter?"

Blackwell worries about that too. Clearwater is a 222-kilometre drive from the proposed district's largest population centre in Williams Lake.

"I really see us basically being abandoned — we'd be an afterthought," he said.

Public consultations on riding boundaries

According to B.C. law, the lieutenant governor must convene a non-partisan Electoral Boundaries Commission to undertake a review of the provincial riding boundaries after every second provincial general election.

Commission chair Nitya Iyer, who also serves as a B.C. Supreme Court justice, admits it's a daunting task to redraw electoral boundaries.

"We would be really interested in hearing from people how better to draw the lines or make recommendations for drawing the boundaries, in a way that complies with the legislation and and the principles of effective representation by population," she said on CBC's Daybreak Kamloops.

Public meetings for the current review are set to end next month, and a final report on findings will be published in April.

Earlier this month, the commission published its preliminary report that suggests creating six additional ridings — in Langford, Kelowna and four Lower Mainland municipalities — and renaming and redrawing boundaries of the existing 87 ridings to reflect the population shifts in the latest census data. 

The commission says each riding should ideally have at least 53,000 people, but it allows a riding's population size to be 25 per cent higher or lower than this number.

According to the commission, there are still five ridings that have a population at least 25 per cent lower than the benchmark of 53,000 people.