Here’s a little-known fact: we don’t have real voter equality in Canada. And here’s another: last week, the federal government introduced the Fair Representation Act that will begin to correct this problem.

Canadians in three provinces — Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia — live in ridings that are much larger than ridings in other provinces. While the average riding size in provinces like Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia is around 70,000 people — and in Prince Edward Island it is just over 30,000 — in Ontario it is about 110,000.

The ridings in the Greater Toronto Area — particularly in the 905 — are by far the largest in the country. In fact, the six largest ridings in the country, with populations of 150,000-170,000, are all in the GTA: Brampton West, Oak Ridges-Markham, Vaughan, Bramalea-Gore-Malton, Halton, and Mississauga-Erindale. In addition to being the most populous ridings in the country, most of these ridings are among the most diverse, with more new Canadians and visible minorities.

In practice, this means voters living in these very populous ridings have less say on who forms government. While 150,000 people in the GTA elect one MP, 150,000 people in Manitoba elect two. The new legislation will begin to correct this.

A new formula is being introduced that would allocate new seats in the House of Commons. These would largely go to the provinces that have rapidly growing populations: Ontario will get 15 new seats, while Alberta and B.C. would get six new seats each.

This is a victory for Premier Dalton McGuinty and for the many Ontarians who have been waging the battle for greater voter equality for people in Ontario for five years. These new seats will move us closer to voter equality, or “representation by population” — the idea that all votes have equal weight. But it won’t get us all the way there.

Canada has a series of constitutional and legislative guarantees that protect the existing number of seats in the four Atlantic provinces, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Voters in these six provinces will continue to see their votes carry more weight. Their ridings will continue to be significantly smaller than in the three quickly growing provinces. To move Canada closer to rep-by-pop, the federal government could add hundreds of new seats in the Commons in Ontario, B.C. and Alberta, but this is clearly untenable.

The other option would be for the federal government to begin taking seats away from the six provinces that are growing more slowly. No federal party seems prepared to embark down that path. As long as Canadians in six provinces are over-represented, Canadians somewhere else will have to be under-represented. That’s just the math, and it will continue to be those living in B.C., Alberta and Ontario because the federal government is also adding three seats to Quebec to ensure that its share of seats remains equivalent to its share of the population.

This seems like a reasonable compromise, but our willingness to accept less than true rep-by-pop comes with two caveats. First, moving forward, the size of the House of Commons should track population growth in Ontario, B.C. and Alberta. If the federal government does not continue to add new seats to reflect rapid population growth in these three provinces, we’ll once again start slipping away from the principle of voter equality. And second, the size of ridings within provinces has to be made more equal.

Right now, the legislation that governs the drawing of electoral boundaries permits ridings to vary plus or minus 25 per cent from the provincial average. What this means in practice is that even if the average riding in Ontario has 110,000 voters, some ridings could have almost 140,000 voters while others could have as few as around 80,000. We think these differences are too large.

In practice, the largest ridings have been in the suburbs around Toronto. The federal government should stipulate that ridings should differ by no more than 5 per cent or 10 per cent from the average. After all, it is Canadians of multi-ethnic backgrounds living around our largest cities, particularly the GTA, who are most under-represented. The federal government will soon create independent, non-partisan boundary commissions in each province to draw the new electoral boundaries.

Voters in the GTA should be vigilant — and insist that their ridings be no more populous than the average.

Continuing to draw enormous ridings in and around our largest cities undermines the principle of voter equality, particularly for new Canadians.

Matthew Mendelsohn is the director of the Mowat Centre at the University of Toronto. Sujit Choudhry is professor of law at New York University. Click here to see their study, Voter Equality and Other Canadian Values: Finding the Right Balance.