Quote:
Originally Posted by ColSJ
Not a fan of roping Saint John- Rothesay north through Grand Bay- Westfield and up into the smaller rural communities and to west towards Lepreau. These areas are heavily conservative and it would scratch at the voting power of the city.
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Well, truth be told, I'm not a fan of his proposal for the Moncton riding either.
Moncton is in fact large enough to have a federal riding conforming just to our municipal boundary. The StatsCan estimate for the population of the city of Moncton is about 81,000, which would be just slightly greater than the average riding population for NB (10 ridings, provincial population estimate currently 802,000).
Moncton/Riverview/Dieppe is a de facto Liberal riding. It is one of the safer Liberal ridings in the country. The anglophone population skews Conservative, but the Acadian vote is overwhelmingly Liberal, hence the Liberal dominance in elections here. It is fairer in provincial elections because there are anglophone neighbourhoods and francophone neighbourhoods, but at the federal level the Liberals win almost all the time.
This tendency would only harden if Riverview were lopped off but Dieppe remained. Even worse, the linguistic profile of the riding would change from 2/3rds anglophone 1/3rd francophone to more of a 50/50 split. This will affect who gets to represent our riding in parliament.
Even now, the real contest is to see who will be our local MP is during the Liberal riding nomination meeting. There are factions in the local Liberal membership (mostly anglophone/francophone), and almost always it is a francophone who secures the nomination. With a combined Moncton/Dieppe riding, I can virtually guarantee you that we will never see an anglophone MP from Moncton ever again.
Now, in some ways, this is a good thing (for Moncton). A fluently bilingual francophone from outside Quebec is almost always a shoe-in for a federal cabinet appointment. Since usually there is only ever one NB cabinet representative, this means that it will almost always be from Moncton (or possibly the north). At present we have
two (francophone) federal cabinet representatives from southeastern NB - Dominic LeBlanc (the godfather of the Liberal party in NB) and Ginette Pettitpas-Taylor. This representation at the cabinet table is profoundly disproportionate. Halifax, a city three times the size of greater Moncton only has one member in cabinet. Southwestern Ontario is almost devoid of cabinet representation despite a population of about 5 million people. Most cabinet representatives from Ontario are from inner city Toronto.