Health geography in Canada: where are we headed?

This paper overviews the emergence of medical/health geography in Canada. The paper discusses the key questions that Canadian health geographers have explored in the past two decades, how these enquiries have featured in the field and how they contribute to the wider discourse of human geography. It also addresses questions on emerging themes and where Canadian health geography will go in the years ahead. With shifting health landscapes in terms of changes in social, political and physical environments, and changes in health care restructuring, Canadian health geographers are entering a new phase of research, teaching and policy. The complexity of the questions that health geographers seek to address means it is necessary to continue to highlight the policy implications of their findings. Health geographers need to emphasize the public agenda through interdisciplinary research and by continuing to work with geographers in other subfields.     

Electoral redistricting and minority political representation in Canada and the United States

This article compares the political representation of visible minorities in Canada and the United States, focusing on differences in federal redistribution (redistricting) practices and constituency composition. Although the two countries both use territorially‐based electoral systems, they operate under different legal standards and institutional environments for the creation of ridings (districts). In the US, redistricting is a highly political process, yet must respect strict population equality standards. Litigation over redistricting is common, and courts adjudicate voting and representation under a constitutional system enforcing strong individual rights. In contrast, Canada's redistribution process is relatively nonpartisan, permits large population variances among ridings, places more emphasis on community rights, and is seldom subject to extensive court challenges. Despite these differences, the two countries exhibit striking similarities in the overall level of visible minority representation relative to population share. Conversely, Canada's population inequalities among ridings create a systematic disadvantage for visible minorities. Political attention to visible minority representation is stronger in the US, but the means to achieve it are constrained both by the judicial limits on group representation and the constitutional limits on the use of racial identity. Canada has a framework for political representation that could easily accommodate significant visible minority representation but lacks the political imperative to use it, in part because doing so would run counter to Canada's multicultural image of these groups as immigrants rather than as non‐white minorities.