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Max's election maps and assorted others

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.

Those party names truly are unbearably ideologically non-committal and generic.
 
And here's all of Southern Ontario, following what I think is the most reasonable definition (points south of Lake Nipissing and the French River).

ontario.png

On this, red stands for unitary authorities (single-tier municipalities and separated municipalities, in Ontarian legalese), while white are lower-tier municipalities that have a county, region or district above them. It is worth noting that the districts (Parry Sound, Nipissing and points north) don't actually have regional governments, so for all intents and purposes every municipality in them is a single-tier municipality. I just have this odd feeling it's misleading to show it that way on the map.

As on the Quebec map, brown is for First Nations reservations, while grey shows unincorporated areas (Algonquin Provincial Park being the biggest one shown on this map). Blue is CFB Borden, the home of the Royal Canadian Air Force, which is exempt from the local government system for unclear reasons.

This is to scale with my earlier Quebec base (which is on the other computer), ergo the slightly jaunty projection. The basemap I'm working from has the coast up to Sault Ste. Marie, but no further - I'm going to have to find a different source if I want to do the whole province at this scale, which I sort of do seeing as how Northern Ontario differs from Northern Quebec in that it actually has a small amount of stuff in it.
 
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.

val-ca-1867.png

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.
 
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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.

View attachment 13051

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.

I cannot recall if it is Hälsingland or Gästrikland, but one of those are divided into tredingar which served as electoral districts back in the unreformed Riksdag.
 
And the middle step between the two maps above: the townships of southern Ontario in 1951, traced off maps provided by the Ontario Provincial Archives.

ontario-counties-1951.png

The red areas are incorporated cities and towns which were outside the township system; there were also towns, boroughs and villages which were subordinate to their townships, none of which are mapped on this (because, well, they're only shown as dots on the original).

A lot of townships in the Muskokas and the Nipissing district weren't actually organised - as you go further north, the division into square townships continues, but not all of them are even named. I assume these were done away with over the succeeding decades, as the provincial government realised that, er, yeah, maybe the settlers aren't five years away after all.
 
And here's Québec at roughly the same time - the map I used as a base has no date, but the French Wikipedia thinks it's from "between 1930 and 1950". Surprisingly, it's much, much harder to find local government maps of Québec than Ontario.

quebec-comtes.png

Québec, unlike Ontario, only had two layers of government: counties and municipalities, of which the latter could be cities, towns, villages, parishes, townships or lack any title besides "municipality". I don't have a map of those, and the county boundaries don't always align with the municipal boundaries that exist today, so you're going to have to make do.

Montréal, Québec City and Trois-Rivières weren't administratively part of any county, but all three had counties based around them (called St-Maurice in the latter case). Their boundaries are shown as they existed immediately prior to the 2002 mergers, except for Montréal, which lacks the areas around the eastern point of the island annexed during the Quiet Revolution. Montréal is also the only city whose boundaries I can say with any certainty are accurate for the time period.
 
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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.
 
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.
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.
 
Of course, the first PQ government in the 70s abolished the counties, replacing them with municipalités régionales de comté (regional county municipalities) whose territory was sometimes, but only sometimes, equivalent to a former county, and whose names for the most part read like an insipid attempt to emulate French department names - for instance, the Comté de Gatineau beceme the MRC La-Vallée-de-la-Gatineau. This is also why it's much harder to find boundaries for Quebec's counties than Ontario's ones, which for the most part survive as administrative divisions.
 
And now for something completely different. I've been looking back at A Jovian Night's Dream recently, and in particular my own additions to that stellar (pun intended) project, so with @Archangel Michael's permission I'd like to share some of what I done.

Firstly, we have a UN-style map of the Scandinavian colony/federal state of Nifelheim on Titan. I'm quite proud of this one.

AJND-nifelheim-1.0.png

An unfinished closer look at the infrastructure of the colony, focused on the county of Lower Håloga (Nedre Håloga).

AJND-nifelheim-transport-0.1.png

The local government division of the aforesaid county. This map would probably look a bit different if I'd made it today.

AJND-kommuner-nh.png

The elections to the Lagting of Nifelheim, which tends to swing back and fourth between Labour, who get support from indigenous parties as well as the small Nifelheim Greens and Socialists, and the agrarian-populist Progressives, who get their backing from the nascent Nifelheim Conservatives.

AJND-val-nifelheim-2131.png

The direct election of the Prime Minister of Vigrid, the Scandinavian colony on Mars, which is known as a left-wing stronghold but also features a strong Science Party, whose ideology is inspired by the US model of technocracy and corporatist mixed economy.

AJND-val-vigrid-2133.png

And finally, the flags of Scandinavia and its constituent countries with basic information on each country.

ajnd-scandinavia-flags.png
 
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Småland is complete for 1917.

val-1917-kommuner.png

If you're wondering what happened to all the bits of Västergötland I'd drawn, well, after pasting in the Jönköping base I discovered that both that and the Halland map were off projection. Which is a hell of a thing to figure out after you've already traced something. The lesson here is never just move up one coast if you're using piecemeal basemaps - paste in segments that connect to more than one existing segment.

Fortunately, I've since discovered that all of Wikipedia's 1952 municipality maps connect to one another, so from here on out I'm going to be using those for a base and then tracing off parishes from supplementary sources.
 
Same here. I had to restart the Selby trace from a different map because the stitching on the 1968 map (which was slightly incomplete) was going off.

On the other hand, as these are on a smaller scale (but still much larger than the final one) it's taking a lot quicker to trace.
 
Saskatchewan 1944
Here's some Canada again - thanks to an excellent site find, I'm going to be able to do a lot of older elections if and when I want to.

This is the groundbreaking Saskatchewan election of 1944, possibly the most exciting thing ever to happen in Saskatchewan, wherein the Liberal government in power for the preceding ten years (and with one interruption, since the province's creation in 1905) was decisively turfed out by the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a slightly awkwardly-named socialist grouping led by firebrand Baptist preacher and social reformer Tommy Douglas. The CCF won all but five seats in the province, backed by disenchantment with the lack of recovery from the Dust Bowl years. This was the first socialist government ever elected in North America, and Douglas went on to be the longest-serving Premier in Saskatchewan's history, sitting until 1961 when he went off to be leader of this new thing the kids were calling the "New Democratic Party", in which post he'd become known as the Father of Medicare and voted the greatest Canadian ever in a CBC poll. But that's all another story.

val-ca-sk-1944.png
 
Right. I was on my phone last night, so I couldn't quite appreciate that site, but oh god it's glorious.
 
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