Correction: Canada is a country with a small number of large cities that determine the national government. There are whole regions of the country that have no representative voice within the governing parties.
I wonder if the real issue is “people don’t want to do things the way I want to do things!”
The balancing act is quite difficult: voting advantage to less populous areas may improve land stewardship (protecting against tyranny of the majority ruining large areas of land due to a minority of people who would have to live with the consequences there) but it would be quite negative to enhance votes to wealthy land owners in particular while doing so (given that a good chunk of the few who live in rural areas own huge amounts of land and thus capital already).
I honestly do not know the best solution, and I agree that "citizens in less densely populated areas get more or stronger votes" by itself does little to solve it, but I also guarantee that "everyone gets one vote issue over" also does not solve it.
In these cases, usually the simplest solution is best, because none are perfect and trying to "engineer" perfect in politics (and economics) is doomed since there is no objectivity.
1 person == 1 vote
Looking at Canada's population distribution, you could win an election with just 82% of the votes in Quebec and Ontario or 67% of those + British Columbia.
The intent of these systems are for the people to be represented in and governed by their province, and their province to be represented in and governed by the federal government. Everyone and everything is equally represented to the governing body above them, but not necessarily to the level above that.
Tangentially, the federal government is meant to primarily rule over the provinces, not the people. Laws are supposed to be passed at that level by a majority of the provinces, not of the people. Quebec has every right to pass whatever law it wants to rule over its people, but what right does it have to use its large population to subject Manitoba or Prince Edward Isles to whatever rules it wants?
It breeds divisiveness. Why would Nunavut or Manitoba still want to be part of Canada if their votes don't matter in any conceivable way? Even banded together, they're 3.7% of the population and no politician is going to listen to them. Nunavut is 85% Inuit; it wouldn't shock me if their political inclinations are different than Quebec/Ontario both due to cultural differences and geographical differences. Why wouldn't they just try to go back to having their own tribal government, since the federal system has devalued their input to nothing?
Federal systems are meant to let provinces emphasize the needs of their own citizens, and to let provinces be unique as a result of their population.
The senate is meant to counterbalance the tyranny of the majority, but in Canada its a decorative institution.
The governing party got 33% of the votes country wide. They govern like a majority because of a supply of confidence deal with a party that got 15% of the vote. The party that got the most votes at 34% essentially had no power. This all worked out because the winning party won a lot of seats in Ontario.
...within the region the person lives so as to avoid a few large clumps of city dwellers living on 2% of the land area ruling it all over the 'rednecks' in the 98% 'flyover country'. Those city dwellers would not like to have countryfolk lording it over them either so why should the opposite be taken as a given? This may work for a small country like the Netherlands where a fast cyclist can cross the whole country within a day but it does not for a large one like Canada where there are provinces the size of large countries with a population less than a large town - Nunavut covers a larger area than Mexico with a population below 40.000.
A better solution would be to split the vote into a few parts, each relating to specific areas of government. National matters - national defence, international relations, more or less the core tasks of a narrowly defined "small government" - can go directly according to the 1 person/1 vote principle and as such will be shaped by city dwellers. Regional (or 'state' in USA terms) matters are a different story, here it makes more sense to let the people living in the region have enough of a voice to be truly represented without being outnumbered by the large voting blocks in a few large cities on the other side of the country. Local matters should be decided by those living in the directly affected area - city, town or county.
This ends up looking quite a lot like the structure theoretically used in the USA which also shows the problems which arise when such a model is used with larger governmental domains - national and state - expanding their powers by taking them away from lower levels.
I’ve heard the same said of capitalism.
PEI: 4 MPs for 176,000 people. = 1 MP per 44000 people BC: 42 MPs for 5.43 million people. = 1 MP per 129,000 people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canadian_federal...