Thank you to our witnesses.
I have two thoughts. First of all, I should say I have to agree with my colleague Ms. Romanado about the underlying problem, but I actually don't think you can add seats for the north unless you were to do the same thing in the south, which would create massive constitutional issues. It would also guarantee enormous unpopularity for our proposal if you were to quintuple the number of seats up here. Given the fact that the north already has half or less than half as many voters per MP, I think you would really have to quintuple the numbers down south, and I don't think the Canadian people would go for that. We'd be talking about 1,500 members of Parliament.
Just to make this point, there are 44,000 people living in the Northwest Territories, and in my riding of Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston there are 98,000 people, so that's more than twice the number in the territory. You can say they are southerners and they've got it good, but it's actually one of the poorer ridings in Ontario. I know of constituents who don't have electricity. We have an aboriginal population which, while it's actually been very, very successfully integrated, still has an unresolved land claim very similar to situations up here. And being a rural area, people are very spread out on the ground. It's not like they need less representation. I would say they need representation and service to the same degree, but already their vote is worth less than half of the vote of a person up here. I don't, by any stretch of the imagination, have the most populous riding in my province. To say that your vote should be worth one-tenth of the vote up here is just not something that is saleable, and I would add as well, not defensible, in my opinion, although I appreciate the good intentions you have in bringing it here.
I am very much aware of the fact that the Northwest Territories has a large number of official languages trying to accommodate the fact that it has so many different indigenous cultures, unlike Nunavut, which has a relatively homogenous indigenous culture that predominates. There's an enormous amount of complexity, and I have no clever idea how to resolve it except to say that your MP, if well chosen, will have to be a very skilled individual to accomplish that.
I'd like to start with you, Mr. Robinson. Three times in your presentation you said, “We are not experts”, and you proceeded to get right a number of things that a number of people with Ph.D. after their names got wrong before our committee, so I was impressed. I think you're more of an expert than you give yourself credit for.
We did hear when we were in Whitehorse about what New Zealand has done. They have Maori districts. I think one American state, the state of Maine, has three aboriginal districts, which they would call Indian districts, one of which is assigned to each of the three, as they would call them, Indian tribes—we would say first nations—of the state. There are a bunch of restrictions on them, and I won't go into details.
The Maori model, on the one hand, is very impressive, but, on the other hand, Maoris are essentially ethnically homogeneous. They aren't spread evenly across the country, but they're spread in such a way that you can accommodate them, and as a further consideration, they don't have the kind of restrictions we constitutionally have. They aren't federal, so you can design your ridings like anything you want. That's why they can deal with their seven districts.
Having put all those caveats in place that are problems, what in general do you think of trying to figure out a way of pushing through, either aspirationally, which we could do, but we'd have to change the Constitution, or perhaps practically, the idea of providing separate indigenous representation?