- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
I've been unable to find data for the 1998 municipal election in Montreal, the last pre-merger one, but that's not a huge deal seeing as how it was very boring and basically just a rehash of the 1994 one, so here's that one.
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The thirty-year reign of Mayor Jean Drapeau and his personalist, federalist, vaguely right-of-centre, extremely corrupt Parti civique was ended in 1986, when he was defeated in an open race by Jean Doré of the Rassemblement des citoyens de Montréal (RCM), an alliance of social-democratic associations, student action groups, community activists, anglophone minority rights activists and trade unions. The RCM simultaneously captured the vast majority of the city council, which it would continue to hold for eight years as the city continued to struggle with population loss and a sky-high municipal debt left behind from Drapeau's lavish spending habits and love of megaprojects (having brought both the World's Fair and the Olympics to the city along with the construction of the Métro). Doré found himself unable to do much about either problem.
In 1994, the citizens decided to toss the RCM out and instead elected Pierre Bourque, the manager of the Montreal Botanic Gardens and organiser of the 1980 Floralies Internationales (because of course Drapeau made sure to bring those to Montreal as well). Bourque was also responsible for the construction of the Montreal Biodome, still an icon of the city, out of the former Olympic velodrome. This had brought him into the public spotlight, and in 1994 he formed a political party which he called Vision Montréal. Bourque's plan combined fiscal responsibility with environmental initiatives, and he's credited with a number of urban renewal projects as well as the stabilisation of the city budget during his first term in office.
Bourque's second term would be more controversial. He believed the root of Montreal's economic problems lay in the municipal boundaries, which kept the city mostly working-class while the more affluent West Island communities governed themselves. This, in Bourque's view, meant that their residents used Montreal's services while not paying tax to the city, and the PQ government of Lucien Bouchard broadly agreed with this view. Bouchard planned a series of municipal amalgamations, similar to those undertaken in Ontario a few years earlier, and Bourque became an enthusiastic participant in this project, calling for the entire Island of Montreal to merge into a single city. Despite some hand-wringing by the West Island towns, who feared their anglophone residents would be poorly taken care of in a majority-francophone city, the merger went ahead on New Year's Day 2002.
Ironically, the merger would prove Bourque's undoing. His two primary opposing groups - the RCM and the West Island anglophones - united into a loose coalition christened the Montreal Island Citizens' Union (MICU, soon shortened to Union Montréal), and nominated businessman Gérald Tremblay for mayor. Tremblay turfed out Bourque as unceremoniously as Bourque had Doré, and Montreal would go on to have absolutely no more troubles ever.
Welcome to Quebec local politics.Those party names truly are unbearably ideologically non-committal and generic.
Well, I feel reasonably comfortable sharing it in its current state, so here goes: the first federal elections in Canada, held on various dates during August and September 1867. Blue is Conservatives and Liberal-Conservatives, who won a majority and formed the government under Sir John A. Macdonald (knighted for his services to confederating the colonies earlier that year), and red is the opposition Liberals.
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This is all of Ontario except the Algoma District, which had just been established in time to elect an MP in 1867. The Nipissing, Parry Sound and Muskoka districts weren't part of any electoral division, so that part of Ontario went unrepresented until the more permanent electoral map came in in 1872.
Quebec remained divided into its 65 electoral districts from when it was Lower Canada, which means they're not described in the British North America Act and therefore a bit tricky to find. The districts were based on the counties of the province, and the ones north of the Saint Lawrence River famously took the shape of river-frontage strips that extended all the way up to the height of land. It goes without saying that I still need to adjust the northern boundary of the province, which followed the height of land for its entire course.
Ontario, unlike Quebec, was redistributed into 82 new districts to adequately represent its larger population. Most of these were based on existing counties, with bigger counties subdivided into areas known as "ridings" (from an old English word meaning a third of a county - in Canada, the term "riding" was used no matter how many ridings a county had), which is the origin of the modern Canadian use of the word "riding" to refer to an electoral district. In another few cases, new "counties" were created for electoral purposes that were never organised politically. Finally, the eight largest cities in the province were represented separately from their parent counties (Toronto having two seats).
New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, which I haven't gotten around to drawing yet, were divided along similar lines to Ontario, with Halifax forming a two-member seat and St. John having one seat for the city and one covering both the city and county (don't ask me why, because I don't know). Nova Scotia's entire delegation bar one member were Anti-Confederationists, but that movement was weakened by a split between radicals, who supported annexation into the US, and moderates, including the party leadership, who felt like they could come around to Confederation if that was the alternative. At that point, the members split about equally between Liberals and Conservatives.
Parishes do exist as administrative divisions in Quebec, but lower-level ones. There's actually a geographic divide between areas surveyed under the French period (mostly along the river), which are divided into parishes (paroisses), and areas surveyed by the British (mostly south and east of the river), which are divided into townships (cantons). The British were also responsible for replacing the capricious and uneven system of seigneuries based on land ownership with fixed counties, which happened gradually from the handover in 1763 until the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1837, when the idea of leaving things as they had been started seeming a lot less harmless to the British.This is interesting. If I don’t misremember, the reason why Louisiana don’t have counties but parishes is because the French colonials used paroisses as administrative divisions as opposed to comtés, so I would have figured Quebec to be similar, but apparently not so.