Thank you.
I have two questions. One starts from a comment.
Professor Carty, you started off by saying that the House doesn't function any better now than when it had 265 seats. I would suggest that there are probably a number of reasons for that, not the least of which is the problem that many of your colleagues have studied: the centralization of power in the Prime Minister's Office, going back to Trudeau and Mulroney, and a trend that we're continuing to see today. I'm not sure it's the size of the House that is the biggest determinant of how well the House is functioning right now vis-à-vis the executive branch.
When you talk about the number being somewhat arbitrary, it's not purely a statistical problem. Every presenter today has acknowledged that, yes, the territories should each have one, regardless of population. Nobody is suggesting that we open the Constitution to deal with the four seats for P.E.I., for example. Yet, why is that? Are you suggesting we ought to be doing that?
This really is a combination of both the statistical problem of how you achieve representation by population in the fairest possible way, and the political problem. In part, this is a nation-building exercise, as it continues to be, and it's an exercise of trying to identify communities of interest.
I'd just like to hear you talk a little bit about squaring that circle.