I think Mr. Dion had an interesting point. I've often thought it odd that the formula involves working with the number of seats for the provinces rather than all the seats. That's a peculiarity. I don't know if it crept into the system with the 1985 formula or if it's simply an artifact of the original much-changed and ever-changing formula that existed before. It is an oddity that we've inherited. It's a legislative oddity, as opposed to a statistical one.
Mr. Smith, I went through the numbers you had there. I took column A and column B and did a quick comparison. I see that they produce fairly minor shifts when we look at the raw numbers for the provinces, most provinces. Then there are significant shifts for Quebec, Ontario, B.C., and Alberta. This is just me doing it by hand.
The population difference in Newfoundland between column A and column B is only 4,000; P.E.I., 3,000; Nova Scotia, 21,000; New Brunswick, 20,000; Manitoba, 29,000; Saskatchewan, 13,000. There is a 105,000 difference in Quebec; 526,000 in Ontario. Column A is always bigger than column B. Alberta is 85,000; British Columbia, 197,000.
Does that mean, effectively, that if we use the numbers in column A as our basis, which is what I think the legislation proposes, versus column B, the status quo, which is what the 1985 formula would propose, and all other things are equal, we would get more or less one extra seat for Quebec, four or five seats for Ontario that wouldn't otherwise be given, and then a seat each for B.C. and Alberta? Is that more or less the practical impact of this?