Would the ideal representation formula be one purely based on representation by population? I think that's probably correct. But given that we have certain constitutional constraints, how can we work within those? If you remove the grandfather clause, what you're saying is, some of the provinces that grow at a slower rate will lose seats and others will not, so you create an inequality between those provinces. I raise the issue that previous versions of this bill didn't treat all the faster-growing provinces in the same way—Ontario was treated differently from Alberta and B.C—so this is in a way the reverse problem with the slower-growing provinces, and that's an issue.
The other thing I would ask is, once you've redistributed some of the grandfather seats in 2011, what do you do in the next redistribution in 2021? It's not clear to me that there would be enough extra seats to redistribute, so you would at that point have to add more seats. As you say, you're delaying adding more seats. If your goal is not to add more seats, you've delayed it by one redistribution; but I don't see from the numbers how you could delay it beyond that, if you want to stick to rep by pop.