Saturday, December 15, 2012

Fun with numbers: populations

Some fun facts:

Canada has 4 large provinces (population) and 6 small ones. The smallest (population) of the large provinces is Alberta.

In 2045, Alberta will have more people than all the provinces (and territories) smaller than it combined.

Manitoba and Prince Edward Island are growing faster than the other 4 "small" provinces. Manitoba, being the largest of the "small" provinces, will thus pull away from them, while Alberta pulls away from it. In the long term we will have Ontario, 3 "large" provinces, Manitoba, and 5 "small" provinces.

BC could overtake Quebec in terms of population as early as 2055. Alberta will eventually overtake BC (and thus Quebec), but this will take longer. No signs point to Ontario dropping from it's #1 spot (It would take to the year 2500 when both Ontario and BC meet up near 135 billion people - which is unrealistic to say the least)

Here are some fun facts about Ridings and population
Quebec has 125 provincial ridings. If the people-per-riding number were applied to each province, it would result in the following number of ridings:
Ontario - 203
BC - 70
Alberta - 58
Manitoba - 19
Saskatchewan - 16
Nova Scotia - 15
New Brunswick - 12
Newfoundland - 8
PEI - 2
Ters - 3 (1 each)

If you applied the Senate clause for PEI, removed BC and Alberta, and Capped Ontario at Quebec's numbers (IE a proposal to make "Quebec happy") you would end up with 327 seats, which is less than the 338 we will have in a few years.

If every province had the same number of persons-per-riding as Nunavut does, they would have the following:

NU - 18
YK - 19
NT - 23
PE - 79
NL - 290
NB - 424
NS - 520
SK - 583
MB - 682
AB - 2057
BC - 2482
QC - 5559
ON - 7251

Ontario's legislature itself would be so large as to qualify for 4 additional ridings.

2 comments:

Calivancouver said...

Some more fun, if you removed all the bribe-clauses for apportionment and used the same method to apportion the United States Congress, in a 338 House, you'd get:

Ontario: 129
Quebec: 79
BC: 45
Alberta: 37
Manitoba: 12
Saskatchewan: 10
Nova Scotia: 9
New Brunswick: 8
Newfoundland: 5
PEI: 1
Terr.: 3

Unknown said...

Terr: 0
In the US, territories don't get voting seats.