Jeff Burgar
Should a tree have a vote? Should an elk or a wolf? How about a pipeline or a farm crop? That might sound ridiculous. It isn’t.

Put another way, who really speaks for the natural environment? Who really votes on its behalf? Nobody, really. Trees don’t get votes. Rivers, lakes and animals don’t get votes. So it happens these “non-entities” rely on people to look after them.

And as it happens, people are notorious for being fickle, easily swayed, and all too often looking after their own interests. This is the result of our voting system, called “representation by population”. It sounds good in theory. Take a long-term view, the end result is almost everybody living in one great big city, probably stretching from Calgary to Edmonton and supported, of course, by the entire resources of the rest of the province. Generally, that means most of rural Alberta, and particularly, northern Alberta.

As a simple example, a Calgary politician might have to vote on building a new sidewalk in his district. The sidewalk is a popular item. People in his district are complaining how the old sidewalk is broken. They want a new one. The farthest thought from their mind is a budget for policing poaching or checking pipelines in northern Alberta.

So, our Calgary politician, sitting around with 20 of his party comrades, all from Calgary, counting up 20 votes, are faced with a lone voice from northern Alberta. That lone voice, who only has one vote, has to sell all the Calgary people, and all the other city politicians, that looking after all of northern Alberta is a good thing to do.

Of course, the new sidewalk in Calgary gets built. Money, no matter where it comes from, just flows to where there are people.

One day, as is law, somebody in government counts up all the people in rural Alberta. And counts up all the people in Calgary and says, “Hey, that lady politician way up there only has 1,000 people voting her into office. But it takes 10,000 people to elect a politician in Calgary. How unfair! We should ‘balance’ this all out to make it ‘fair.’”

And that is happening right now, as redistribution is studied. Eventually, all that empty space in the north will be looked after by a politician or two in Edmonton and Calgary.

Of course, that space definitely is not “empty.” It is full of trees, lakes, streams, farms, animals and industry, none of which gets a vote.

It is ludicrous to think politicians, even well-meaning politicians, are going to always give the same consideration to any part of northern Alberta as they would give to the view outside their window or what a voter a few streets over might think. It is just as ludicrous to think that 20 Calgary politicians in the same boat will do a better job than any one of them. Even more ludicrous to think all 20 of them will somehow be more qualified than even one person who lives and breathes and represents her slice of northern Alberta.
Yet, that is exactly where our so-called “fair” and “equitable” voting system is heading.

Mandatory redistribution is not about fairness. It is all about the total destruction of rural and northern Alberta’s voice.