One of the things that pops-up from time-to-time is the idea that there are too many municipalities in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. The are 27 municipalities in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. There are 2.9 million people that live within these municipalities. This works out to one municipality per 109,000 people.
In the rest of BC, there are 1.6 million people that live within 135 municipalities. This works out to one municipality per 12,000.
Lower Mainland residents are underrepresented when it comes to municipalities compared to the rest of the province.
One argument about having less municipalities is that it will be more efficient because of deduplication of services. As I posted about in the past, duplication is minimal to nil in Metro Vancouver.
The other argument is that some people feel that there are just too many mayors and councillors.
In the Lower Mainland, people are already underrepresented when it comes to the number of municipalities. There are 195 people locally elected to councils in the Lower Mainland. This includes mayors and councillors. This works out to one municipal representative per 15,000 people overall.
This is not distributed evenly. Langley City has one municipal representative per 4,000. Abbotsford has one per 18,000. Surrey has one per 64,947.
As pointed out in a recent CBC article, 48 of BC’s 87 provincial electoral districts are within the Lower Mainland. This means that there is one MLA per 62,000 people.
Because 62,000 people is a lot of people to represent, each MLA gets a constituency office. A MLA’s base salary is $111,024. Each MLA also gets $141,400 to hire staff and run a constituency office. It would be impossible to serve 62,000 people on your own. That is a total cost of $252,424, or $4.07 per person in an electoral district on average in the Lower Mainland.
In Surrey, the mayor has a base salary of $147,019 while a councillor has a base salary of $74,980. With total salaries of $746,859, this works out to $1.28 per person in Surrey.
In Abbotsford, the mayor has a base salary of $122,379 while a councillor has a base salary of $46,132. All in, this works out to $3.10 per person in Abbotsford.
In Langley City, the mayor has a base salary of $115,446 while a councillor has a base salary of $53,874. All in, this works out to $15.83 per person in Langley City.
Councillors do not get funding for constituency offices.
As someone who is elected in Langley City, I feel that I can keep up with local issues and have time to meet up with residents to help them. I honestly don’t know how I would be able to do that if I was elected in a community like Surrey.
A case could be made to create more municipalities in Metro Vancouver. Surrey would be a clear example of a community that is under-represented at the local level.
In the Lower Mainland, there are less municipalities per person than the rest of the province. There are regional services, and coordination of services between municipalities. Some of the larger municipalities are underrepresented at the local level.
While it might look nice on a map to have fewer municipalities in the Lower Mainland, it would result in less representation than at the provincial level.
Addressing local issues is critical as they have the most impact on people’s lives. We should be looking to enhance representation, not reduce it.
As a note, Lower Mainland means the Metro Vancouver and Fraser Valley Regional Districts. The population estimated are for 2019 from BC Stats. All local government salaries are from 2019.
1 comment:
I love this analysis! Doing the math, to have the same municipal representation as the rest of BC, we would need 241 cities in the Lower Mainland and 10x as many councillors as now.
You mentioned that the Lower Mainland has 48 out of 87 provincial electoral districts. Since we have 2.9 million people out of 4.5 million total in BC, proportionally we should have 56 districts. Some of the northern electoral districts are pretty large and it would be unwieldy to combine them. So perhaps we should also increase the total number of MLAs to around 230 so that the Lower Mainland can have equal representation compared to the rest of BC.
There's a similar movement in the US to increase the size of the US House of Representatives to 1700 or 6500 members. https://www.reddit.com/r/UncapTheHouse/
Post a Comment