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Part of the Acadian riding of Acadie-Bathurst has been carved out and annexed to the riding of Miramichi, to the south. "What they have done is removed the francophone people that don’t speak one word of English and put them in Miramichi, where they have a member of Parliament there that doesn’t speak one word of French,” says Yvon Godin (NDP-Acadie-Bathurst). The changes were made when the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission discovered there were 35 per cent more people in Acadie-Bathurst than in Miramichi. New Brunswick, with a population of 720,000, is divided into 10 federal ridings. So, according to the electoral boundary rules, each riding must have as close to 72,000 people as possible to be considered equal. The guiding principle is "one person, one vote" — that one person’s vote in one riding must have the same value as one in another riding. For this reason, population was shifted from Acadie-Bathurst to Miramichi. However, Godin says Acadians in Acadie-Bathurst feel the change will make them lose contact with their linguistic community. He says they must protect New Brunswick's official bilingual status — something the Acadian community fought to have included in Canada’s Constitution in 1982. "It’s not like you’re in the middle of Toronto and you’re changing the riding boundaries from one side of the street to the next side of the street, and they’re still using all the same services," he says.
"It’s not like that in a rural area. People are together by group and by mentality.” Godwin says he already has received calls from Riviere-du-Portage — an area on the border of Acadie-Bathurst — from people who want federal services but cannot speak to officials in their language. One call was from a man who wanted Employment Insurance benefits but couldn't communicate with the government employees. The community came out to show its opposition to what was being proposed. "At the electoral commission hearings, there were over 25 people opposed to the change,” says NDP riding president Emilien Savoie. "People from Bathurst and the Acadian Peninsula came out to show their opposition. Francophones are 100 per cent opposed to it.” Special circumstance
The electoral boundaries commission has leeway to allow as much as 25 per cent variation from the provincial quota under “special circumstance,” Godin says. He cites Kenora-Rainy River in northern Ontario, where a new electoral district has 60,572 people. This is 43 per cent fewer people than a typical Ontario riding is supposed to have to be considered equal. The Ontario commission argued that the exception was allowed because of the huge geographical size of the riding and the fact that the largest city, Kenora, has a population of just 15,838. Adding more people to the riding to make it equal to others would have made it too big. Politics of representation Redistribution is usually challenged when a rural riding is placed in an urban or suburban one. Last year, the northern Ontario riding of Algoma-Manitoulin, for example, avoided being annexed to parts of Sudbury, when residents protested. But the commission does not consider linguistic community a reason to override electoral balance. In their report, the commission stressed that their main concern was maintaining “equitable representation.” If the boundary change goes through, there will be just three ridings with a francophone majority in New Brunswick and seven predominantly anglophone ones.
Joseph Yvon Theriault, a University of Ottawa sociologist who studies francophone and Acadian communities, says this goes against a consensus within the Acadian community that they deserve about half of New Brunswick’s 10 ridings. "The issue is that the Acadians deserve three or four ridings where they are the majority. We are one of the two majority groups in New Brunswick. We are more than 30 per cent of the population. We are a majority on half of the territory of New Brunswick," he says. "The Acadians are saying that we are the minority, so it’s us who should be over over-represented, not the anglophones.” The consensus on provincial bilingualism is unique to New Brunswick, Theriault says, and Acadians want to have their arrangement reflected in the federal ridings, even though it is not required by law. "The ridings are not in the Constitution. What is in the Constitution
is the recognition that New Brunswick is founded on two linguistic groups
and that each linguistic group has the right to their institutions. But,
they don’t define what ‘institutions’ are.”
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Report
of the federal electoral boundaries commission for New Brunswick 
