Madam Speaker, coming from the Yukon, my colleague has an extraordinarily large area to represent and he travels across the country every week. I do not know how he does it. He is an iron man as far as I am concerned.
My colleague is talking about the possibility of representation by population. I have some very serious issues with that, for a number of reasons. There are some rep by pop that are done very poorly. Israel and Italy are examples of that, where they have constant turmoil and minority governments that are continually falling. There are some that may work, such as the situation in Germany, where they have a form of representation by population. As I said before, what is much more important than how we elect members of Parliament, is their ability to represent the people and to do their job. The effectiveness as an MP is an order of magnitude more important than how many members we have in the House and how we are selected.
We can change this any way we want. We can have any rep by pop we want and have more seats. However, if the MPs are still disempowered to represent their people, then what is the point? Our citizens want us to represent them. Therefore, we have to turn this whole equation on its head. We have to empower members of Parliament to have the freedom to speak, to innovate and to vote and not have the penalties laden on us when we try to represent our constituents.
The challenge that our citizens do not understand, because we have not explained it, is this. When we do not do what we are told to do, then there is a series of penalties that comes with that. This should not happen because it is not democratic. That is what we have to change.
The empowerment of MPs and the solutions I gave might be some of ways the House may want to consider the future.