Drawing Boundaries: Legislatures, Courts, and Electoral Values

Agar Adamson is the author of Letters of Agar Adamson, 1914–19 and former chair of the Department of Political Science at Acadia University in Nova Scotia.

One of the unfortunate aspects of politics and electoral democracy is
that so few Canadians read about the subject or even care about the
process except during an election campaign. The work under review falls
into this category. It deserves wide exposure, but it will be read only
by political scientists who glory in “taking in each other’s
washing.”

Constituency size and redistribution and the impact of the Charter of
Rights on electoral politics and democratic values are among the issues
addressed in this book, which is based on a conference held at the
University of Saskatchewan in 1991. The crux of the work is a discussion
on issues of redistribution in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British
Columbia.

The general reader will be turned off by the pedantic and jargon-filled
prose. This is the book’s principal flaw: it contains little to entice
the average Canadian to read on. For students and scholars, however, the
book should be a staple in the political-science literature for years to
come.