Why don all MPs represent roughly the same number of constituents?
There are at least four issues involved. The first is the vast difference in population density across Canada. The riding of Nunavut has 29,474 people inhabiting 3,117,463 square kilometres. Big-city ridings with many high-density apartment buildings can contain more than 100,000 voters in a tiny fraction of that space. In city ridings, it is relatively easy for an MP to visit and represent all parts of his or her riding. That’s not the case in ridings with farflung borders, especially in the Far North, so that kind of riding has historically been allowed to contain many fewer than the national average number of voters. At the moment, one MP represents each of the three northern territories of Nunavut, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. The second issue is the difficulty of keeping up with rapidly changing population rates in parts of Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. Some ridings in the Greater Toronto Area, for example, can add tens of thousands of people from one election
