I want to thank all of the witnesses for their very interesting testimony. I'm not sure who I should be thanking for the lovely weather. I got to go out and wander around town for about an hour and a half. It was really nice and really refreshing.
Mr. Arreak, I want to start by asking you a little bit about some of the things you said. This is why I had my computer open. While you were talking, I was looking up some population figures. Baked into the DNA of the House of Commons in Canada or, more correctly, baked into the constitutional provisions that structure the House of Commons is the concept of representation by population, the idea that all ridings should be roughly equivalent in size within a province. That's pretty much an ironclad rule across provinces. We allow for fluctuation, but as little as possible. Then an exception is made for the territories, because they are so much smaller.
This raises a question. I actually have three questions. I'll read them to you at all once, because I think it would be better if they were answered thematically.
The first is on having two MPs for Nunavut, if that's what you were advocating. Unless we greatly increased the number of members of Parliament elsewhere in the country, that would have the effect of causing a very significant disproportion and a departure from the principle of representation by population. That's the first thought on which I would invite your comment.
Second, when you talk about the idea of having three members of Parliament who would serve as the parallel of the Maori seats in New Zealand, presumably one for each of the three general groupings, I assume you meant Inuit, Métis, and first nations as the three groups. There are two basic problems that I can see constitutionally with this. The first is that there's no provision in the Canadian constitution that permits seats that overlap provincial boundaries.
You could in theory have a single member of Parliament representing multiple territories. We asked about that in the other territories, and people weren't very enthusiastic about it. Of course, a large number of Inuit people live in northern Quebec and also in Newfoundland and Labrador. Geographically I could see how that would work, but constitutionally, there is a hard impediment to it.
The other problem I see with this is just a matter of fairness and the idea of representation by population. Wikipedia says there are 59,445 Inuit people in Canada—I guess that's as of the last census—451,000 Métis, and 851,000 people from first nations. You can see a substantial disproportion.
I realize I'm giving a very mechanistic interpretation of what you're saying. The distinction between this and the Maori in New Zealand is that the Maori are essentially one ethnicity. They have different tribes that used to fight each other, but they are one ethnicity, and that makes things a great deal simpler.
I throw out those problems to you and I'm looking for your feedback as to how you would respond to them.