Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to both of our panellists, the members of the audience, and those who will speak at the open mike to follow.
I'll maybe allow Mr. Blain to continue with regard to Mr. Aldag's line of questioning. I'm quite interested in this as well.
In light of testimony we heard earlier this week when we travelled to Whitehorse...and indeed from some of the observations of our committee member Nathan Cullen, who was with us earlier in the week, who represents a large riding in British Columbia. As members of Parliament, we've had a lot of discussion from the members here. Under the current system, when the election is over we are—all of us, I hope—committed to representing all of our constituents, regardless of who they voted for. We take a lot of steps to try to do that through meeting with constituents. In a city, where you can have an office that's accessible to most people, that's one thing, but for these large ridings, a member of Parliament has to do a lot travel in between all the rest of their parliamentary duties in Ottawa.
I'm glad Mr. Nash mentioned urbanization. The process of urbanization makes ridings bigger and bigger and bigger over time, because the size of a riding doesn't typically change. When there's redistribution for population growth, it adds cities to where more people live, and thus makes the other areas larger and larger. Any type of system of proportionality I think inherently exacerbates that issue in the north.
Specifically in the Yukon, there seemed to be no interest, from any of the panellists or audience members, in lumping together territories. Even those who preferred proportional representation perhaps for the rest of Canada did not want to see it in their own area.
I'll let perhaps each of you address that.