Voter Equality & Other Canadian Values: Finding the Right Balance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Representation by population (rep-by-pop) was one of the principal forces behind the creation of Canada and is a key pillar of democracy. Although some deviations from the norm of voter equality are acceptable, they should be grounded in principles that are widely accepted and viewed as legitimate. Canada’s federal electoral districts deviate from the rep-by-pop principle more than they ever have in our history. This is the result of Canada’s increasingly outdated rules and practices governing the distribution of seats in the House of Commons and our demographic changes. This problem is getting worse and, unless there is fundamental reform, will continue to do so in the future. Moreover, the character of voter inequality is changing. For decades, citizens in Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia, and urban centres have suffered from declining voting power. But in the face of massive immigration, the dilution of some Canadians’ votes and the amplification of others increasingly disadvantages Canadians from non-European backgrounds who are more likely to live in ridings with the largest populations. This Mowat Note identifies the constitutional, legislative and policy reasons why Canada so dramatically deviates from the principle of voter equality. It then explains if and how each of these factors can or should be addressed at present. It concludes with a proposed framework for a compromise piece of legislation that would deal with many, but not all, of the issues that produce such a skewed electoral map.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".