Quebec's New 127 Seat Map
Please, no more court battles, just use the map you got.
Following up from my prior post on Quebec’s provincial redistribution, we now - finally - have a new map for Quebec’s upcoming general election. Boy did it take time to get here.
To keep the background information of this short and sweet - some folks did not like the boundary commission’s decision to slash a seat in the Gaspésie region. The National Assembly agreed with these concerns, and said they wouldn’t move forward with the new maps - and off to court everyone went, all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada. The SCC decided that, actually, no, the Québec government couldn’t decide to void its own commission on a whim, and that to override it, the National Assembly would need to do it themselves and stop being cowards about it.
And so that’s where we ended up. Last week the Assembly passed Bill 3, which not only protected the Gaspésie seats but also protected a slashed seat in eastern Montréal, Anjou-Louis-Riel, and reverted all those changes too (plus the changes to the constituencies of Laurier-Dorion and Viau which weren’t related to ALR’s redraw… your guess is as good as mine for what happened there). Everywhere else, however, saw their commission changes stick - thus the two new regions seats of Bellefeuille and Marie-Lacoste-Gérin-Lajoie are added on, finally increasing Québec’s constituency count from 125 to 127 for the first time since 1989. Bravo!
I had completed the transposition of the commission’s maps awhile back, so all I had to do was take out the Gaspésie and affected eastern Montréal seats. Not a lot of work end of the day, but glad to see this is behind us now.
You can view and take the 2022, 2018, and 2014 transposition numbers from this Google Sheet. You can also view and download from the embed below.
If you’re looking for GIS files because Elections Québec still hasn’t uploaded them as of publishing (I don’t know why either!), contact me via Substack DMs or email.