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Nova Scotia’s Electoral Boundaries Commission cautiously strayed beyond its mandate and urged provincial politicians to get creative and bridge the province’s urban-rural divide or risk a widening rift.

While Halifax — or HRM — continues to grow, the population of most counties is shrinking, raising heightened anxiety that rural Nova Scotia is losing its voice and, with it, access to adequate public services.

HRM is home to about 40 per cent of the province’s people and 40 per cent of the 55 seats in the legislature proposed by the commission.

If the trend toward urbanization continues, future redistribution of seats will see fewer and larger rural ridings, resulting in less effective rural representation. With a diminished voice in the legislature, rural concerns could take a back seat to urban issues, feeding a cycle of decline in rural communities.

The boundary commission tried to find the right balance between the competing electoral principles of voter parity and effective representation. Parity is the notion that every vote carries the same weight, while effective representation recognizes that strict adherence to parity mutes minority voices.

The commission, which released its final report this week, recommends the number of seats in the legislature increase from 51 to 55 with the creation of four exceptional seats to ensure Acadian and African Nova Scotians are more effectively represented.

But it is clear the commission sees broader issues of effective representation in Nova Scotia’s near future that will be difficult or impossible to remedy by merely redrawing boundary lines.

“Although it is outside our mandate, we respectfully recommend that future governments consider consulting the public and elections experts about whether a proportional system would achieve more effective representation than our current single-member plurality (first-past-the-post) system.”

There are limits to how far democracies can stray from voter parity in the name of effective representation and still retain some allegiance to the ideal that all votes are equal.

The commission found that limit when it failed to recommend a 56th seat in the legislature to provide effective representation to the small Acadian enclave in and around Chéticamp in northern Inverness County.

Argyle, Clare and Richmond were all created as exceptional Acadian seats, ranging in size from 6,450 to 7,460 voters. The average constituency size in the proposed 55-seat house is over 13,000 voters, and peaks at 16,558 in the largest riding, Hants East.

But the commission itself divided along urban-rural lines over the question of a seat for Chéticamp. The five commissioners from HRM couldn’t bring themselves to support a riding with just 2,585 voters, while the four commissioners from outside HRM felt the principle of effective representation applies to this isolated community.

Acadians from that area have not enjoyed effective representation on par with other Nova Scotians, argue the four dissenters, noting that only two Acadians have been elected from the district since Confederation.

“It has been argued that the commission’s proposals to address effective representation in Chéticamp and environs yielded an unacceptable deviation from voter parity. We respectfully disagree. Chéticamp and its surrounding communities present an extraordinary case — a linguistic, cultural, historical, and geographical community of interest needing more effective representation,” states the letter of dissent.

The commissioners supporting an exceptional seat for Cheticamp raised the spectre of rural decline, and noted that in its interim report, the commission stated: “an indirect result of the way boundaries are redrawn actually contributes to further rural decline.”

“Simply stated, as more MLAs become concentrated in a continuously growing number of urban electoral districts, rural districts grow geographically larger. This may disrupt communities of interest or cause them to disappear. As a result, political decisions regarding services and programs may become more urban-focused and geared toward continued centralization. This could lead to a snowball effect that pulls power away from important rural and cultural communities throughout the province.”

The dissenters acknowledged there are wider forces and multiple variables contributing to rural decline in Nova Scotia, but “it is naive to think that a strict adherence to representation-by-population and voter parity is not one of them.”

The warning implicit in the commission’s report needs to be heard and heeded by the province’s legislators.

The commission worried that increased tensions can arise as rural communities feel their place in the political life of the province is diminished, resulting in increased social fragmentation along geographic and other lines.

When legislators eventually address the question of effective representation in the face of declining population across rural Nova Scotia, they are deciding more than just the makeup of the House of Assembly. They are helping to determine the nature of the province.

Is ever-increasing urbanization inevitable, leading to the equally inevitable decline in much of rural Nova Scotia? Or is Nova Scotia a place that embraces and nurtures both its urban economic core and its traditional rural and small town character?

For what it’s worth, that second choice sounds like a balance worth striving for.