" 
 ::The ""ancient"" Comox riding had in the range of 30-40 voters and covered the whole coast from Parksville on up and including Skeena-Stikine Countries (even though there were virtually no whites up there to vote...I'm meaning in say 1880 or so), Atlin's a bit of a legacy of that, or was.  But coming from the ""outcountry"" like I do (Shalalth) I've always had sympathy for voters in rural regions who don't see it logical that voters in an urban concentration hundreds of miles away should have a greater say in their affairs than they do themselves; so I look askance at Williams Lake dominating two ridings, ditto Prince George, and at how in various combinations rural, often native areas, are really not represened by candidates chosen by the towns; you may be aware of my strong antipathy towards regional districts which is based on similar notions of ""representation by area"".  ""Rep by pop"", if you examine it historically, I think you'll find is something popular with urban populations because it makes sense to them, but rural populations have their reasons not to like it (whether aboriginal or not).  So while there are some urban ridings which have way more population than either of the Prince George or Peace Country pairs of ridings (or as was formerly the case maybe...) the reality is that the regions affected are not so many city blocks, but vast entities with particular geographic interests/issues.....and waht vote-concentration means is that with squeaky wheels getting the grease, the Lower Mainland/GV gets most of the ""big infrastucture spending"", in the same way that southern Ontario and Montreal-Quebec City get a lot of vote-buying largesse; it's only when the outer regions have had a disproportionate ""share of power"", relative to their smaller populations, that is, that they've gotten any kind of respect.  The Swiss system solves this somewhat by making urban cantons separate from the surrounding countryside ones; e.g. Bern vs. Jura or Basel-land vs Basel-stadt, Geneva vs Lausanne (though, granted, Lausanne's still a pretty large city)...and Grisons, the Romansh-flavoured southeastern canton, has nothing like the population of Zurich or even Interlaken; I think its largest ""city"" is St. Moritz.  Of course the Swiss system devolves power down to even smaller local-governance quotients, with individual villages effectively being self-governing on many matters which their neighbours can have nothing to say about unless it directly affects them.  but this is comparing apples and oranges anyway; our representatives do not really represent the interests of their constituents, more they're the excuse-makers, heat-takers and bagmen for the government (if they're government members) or moderators for disenfranchised constituencies (if non-government members).  Some do their best, to be sure, but really voters and riding boundaries are just ways to engineer popular sentiment into mandates for near-absolute authority by ruling parties.....I won't POVize further, like I said, I just hope STV passes by something so overwhelming that the bastardy of the plurality ridings are swept into the dustbin of history where they belong; they had a point in the old old days when you actually knew the candidates personally; but they're hardly valid when there's 40,000 people swayed only by advertising and lies and pork barrelling...I agree about Gracie's Finger (which was always capitalized in the press) needing an article; it's one of several Socred-era scandals in need of articles, but sources are relatively hard to find and ""you had to be there"" to know when and where to look, e.g. the Vander Zalm-era driver's licensing scandal, ditto Fantasy Gardens itself; but Gracie's Finger was so noxiously blatant as electoral scandal huh?  There were others, but none with as catchy a name....   
 ::Parting comment for the night, one would hope that ststistical breakdowns of voter behaviour aren't as engineer-able as statisticians and pollsters would like, and that real issues actually have the ability to ""defy all predictions"", as happened in '91 for example.  Old habits die hard, but they do die....one hopes.  "