Split city: Some B.C. voters don't feel represented as urban centres carved into sprawling, rural ridings

When Paul Sanborn started researching the upcoming federal election, he was dismayed to learn he had been moved into a new electoral riding to which he feels very little connection — and which he worries will fail to represent his views.

The Prince George, B.C. resident had previously been on the northern edge of Cariboo-Prince George, which extends roughly 300 kilometres south to just past the community of 100 Mile House.

But as part of a redistribution process, he had now been moved into the southwest corner of the Prince George-Peace River-Northern Rockies riding, which extends roughly 250 kilometers southeast to the Alberta border and more than 600 kilometers north up to the Yukon and Northwest Territories, passing through the communities of Dawson Creek, Fort St. John and Fort Nelson. 

"Maybe I was just being a bit grumpy but, you know, it just seems odd that we [the city of Prince George] keep getting sliced and diced in a different way every few years," he said, adding that he'd like to see the city turned into its own standalone riding.

Sanborn says while he feels there's a natural connection between Prince George and the other communities in his old riding, particularly with the importance of the forest industry in the region, there's very little tieing him to voters in the province's northeast, where many people work in oil and gas and have strong ties to Alberta.

"There's a social and economic flavour to this area which sets it apart from northeastern B.C., so to me it doesn't really make sense to put them in the same constituency," he said. "I would like to see a more rational boundary."

What Sanborn has come up against is what those responsible for creating electoral boundaries across the country call "the British Columbia challenge": the process of trying to create ridings of roughly equal populations across a vast and varied geography.

And it opens up questions about whether the current electoral system goes far enough in ensuring accurate representations of voters' desires.

One of the most obvious examples of this complaint in B.C.'s Interior and north can be seen by looking at the results of the 2015 federal election.

That year — like every other election year before it going back to 2004 — the Conservatives swept the majority of the region, including the cities of Kamloops and Prince George.

But a closer look at the poll-by-poll data shows the Liberal candidates were narrowly preferred by voters in each of those cities, while a stronger Conservative preference was recorded in outlying regions, allowing the party's candidates to win.

Tracy Calogheros was the Liberal candidate for Cariboo-Prince George and says it's frustrating to know she had connected with voters in the largest city in her region but was not able to represent them.

"You end up losing an urban centre voice in the north because it's diluted out across such a large, rural area with very different issues," she said. 

And Trevor Bolin, a Conservative Party member in Fort St. John who did get to see his MP of choice go to Ottawa, feels the same way.