Thank you to our three panellists for being here today. To the citizens who are here in the audience, thank you for being here.
It's my first time in the Northwest Territories. I wish I were outside playing, but I'm enjoying my time here with you.
I have a question about fairness.
We've heard from a lot of Canadians that our current system is not fair, and that we need to move to a system that's much fairer.
We've heard today, Ms. Balakrishnan, you feel that in order to have proper proportionality, you would recommend that the Northwest Territories have five members of Parliament. As you know, the devil is always in the details. How can I say to people in my riding of Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, in which I have 83,719 voters, that they'd get one MP, but for voters in the Northwest Territories, with 29,432 voters, you want five? Each member of Parliament would represent 5,886 voters. The time that a member of Parliament could allocate to their constituents would be much greater in the Northwest Territories than it would be in downtown Montreal, or Toronto, and so forth. I think it's great; I think we should be able to give even more time to our constituents.
We would also have to look at the costs. For each member of Parliament that we increase in the Northwest Territories, there is a cost of approximately $637,220 just in terms of our member's operating budget, travel budget, and salary, not including the travel back and forth. We're talking about $2.5 million every year to have four more members of Parliament. When we're talking in terms of fairness, it would be difficult for us to go back to Canadians and say that just to satisfy proportionality we need to increase members of Parliament in whatever region or whatever constituency to x number, but it's not proportional to the number of constituents.
I'm just throwing that out there because we're talking about fairness. It would be difficult for us. I'm not trying to pick on the Northwest Territories, or my riding, or anything, but how would we sell this to the general public if we told them they're not going to get to see their MPs as often as someone in the Northwest Territories? Could you comment on that?