Saskatchewan's fixed-date municipal elections approach on November 13, a date well-known to myself because I am currently running for mayor of Val Marie. (Please spare the applause, this is a contested race.)

A mass mailout reminded me that, on the same day that I have the opportunity to vote for myself, I will also be asked to elect a Chinook School Board Trustee. The little village of Val Marie, you see, lies within Subdivision 7.

I think of myself as a fairly politically involved person, but with no children of my own currently enrolled in Saskatchewan's crumbling public schools, I had honestly never considered that my rural school division would have its own electoral geography. Being comprised only of the three small communities of Ponteix, Val Marie, and Vanguard, plus their expansive rural catchment areas, Subdivision 7 rings in with a cumulative population of 3,571.

Residents of Chinook Subdivisions 1-6 will miss the opportunity to vote: all of their races have already been won by acclamation, a common situation in this thinly populated part of the world. I cannot imagine that a sudden, intense public interest in school board governance would actually be a good thing, so I wish the acclaimed candidates all the best.

There is almost nothing that annoys me more than geographic information that clearly exists, but has never been loaded into any kind of open data hub. Here is Chinook School Division's official election map for the public:

These subdivision maps were clearly made by various GIS professionals inside the Ministry of Education, and the boundaries of the school divisions themselves can be downloaded by anybody thanks to the saskatchewan.ca REST server. But I have not been able to find any single, official source for GIS files describing these electoral subdivisions. We just have to rely on a random collection of .pdfs (although a couple divisions at least publish some legal boundary descriptions).

Because I get bored really easily, I decided to spend an afternoon geo-referencing and digitizing these .pdfs by hand. Among other things, this lets me run some simple statistical analysis on them. I just can't stand voting in any election where I haven't manually checked the population variance of the districts!!

To my surprise, rural voting subdivisions are actually pretty evenly balanced. As of the 2021 census, Chinook's extremities are Subdivision 6 (Shaunavon) with 4,481 residents, against Subdivision 1 (Leader) with 2,959. This is still a big disparity by the standards of Saskatchewan's strictest-in-the-country provincial ridings, which can't exceed 5% deviation from the average population, but at the municipal level it's positively equitable.

What's going on with Division 8, a.k.a. Swift Current, the only city under Chinook's jurisdiction? This community has a respectable population of 16,750 and elects 3 trustees - that's 5,583 residents per trustee, blowing Shaunavon out of the water.

However, Swift Current and Shaunavon both have one thing in common: they each contain one Catholic school run by the Holy Trinity Roman Catholic School Division, based out of Moose Jaw. In Western Canada, voters are asked at the ballot box if they support their public OR their Catholic school district, and are accordingly presented with a single roster of candidates. No double-dipping!

If we assume that a few hundred ratepayers select a "Catholic preference", then Subdivision 6 contains fewer public school voters than we think, and the districts are more equal than their census population counts indicate. (The Canadian census does not enumerate school preference, and many non-Catholic parents will send their children to a Catholic school for any number of cynical reasons.)

After picking apart Chinook, did I get really bored and end up digitizing all 139 geographical subdivisions that elect public school board trustees in the entire province of Saskatchewan? The answer is yes, but I'll save that for a future post...