Tuesday, April 29, 2025

the real reason that the three ridings in windsor swung to the conservatives is gerrymandering via redistribution. windsor is a small city with a very left wing, union-dominated population. the city itself take up a large space, and is surrounded by large amounts of more conservative exurban or suburban regions, bordering into remnant farmlands. those rural areas vote conservative.

previously, there were two small urban ridings and one big rural riding and the result was two left wing representatives (ndp or liberal) and one conservative, for the rural riding. what redistricting did was blur the rural/urban split, which folded the small urban zones into the larger rural zones. the urban zones are more densely populated but there are more people in the larger rural areas.

i would suspect that this is actually what also happened in hamilton, london and sudbury, but i don't know those areas well.

the ndp have been complaining for decades that the system does this on purpose. what actually happened to the ndp in saskatchewan was that the previous urban zones were folded into the rural zones, in a process that is quite similar to what happened in windsor.

this could create some problems here, as if the population has no legitimate representation, it will begin to act like it's unrepresented, which it now is. however, it might be difficult to undo. i mean, look at the long term result of redistricting in saskatchewan - the ndp have been wiped out of saskatchewan for decades.