Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Nov. 22nd, 2011

[Stéphane Dion, Liberal, Saint-Laurent—Cartierville, QC]

Formula 308 is the proposal that the third party in the House has tabled. I think you are aware of this proposal. It is to change the grandfather clause by the 15% rule, ensuring that no province would lose many seats in one allocation. It would always be a modest decrease. Let's say that Manitoba and Saskatchewan would stay at 12 seats, instead of going lower.

[Dr. Kenneth Carty]

Well, as I indicated in my comments, I think the grandfather clause is the source of the real problem. But the 15% rule was a previous rule, again, to avoid the hard question about what the real numbers should be. So if I were to take my principal position to its extreme, I would say we ought to do away with that rule as well.

Now, if in fact there's a sense that, having fixed the number, we ought to have a transition to it, then something like the 15% rule might be appropriate. But it does seem to me that both of these rules are different ways of avoiding the real questions of how big a House we need, what it does, and how fairly apportioned it should be.

So in principle, I'm opposed to both rules, but I understand that if you wanted to fix the size, you might want something like the old 15% rule as a way of transitioning.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Mr. Williamson, you have four minutes, please.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you, Chair.

Professor Carty, I'm interested in zeroing in on some of your comments. I appreciate what you're saying about going after a number and working towards that. But again, recognizing some of the quagmires or problems that exist in regard to minimum representation, what do you think the effect would be in prairie provinces if one day Manitoba or Saskatchewan had fewer seats than New Brunswick or Nova Scotia, because of the Senate representation—or even equal seats?

I can ask some of these questions because I'm from New Brunswick. We're dug in with 10 senators, 10 seats. We're not going to lose anything. But I do wonder what the effect would be on some of these other provinces, a province of 1.2 million people versus a province of 750,000, having the same number of seats in the House of Commons—or potentially fewer.

I'll leave it at that. I'm curious to get an answer.

[Dr. Kenneth Carty]

I think that's the heart of the problem. If we got to a stage where there were three or four much larger provinces—and you point to the prairie provinces as the case, if they had fewer seats than New Brunswick—I think you'd be coming close to serious constitutional issues.

New Brunswick, and potentially Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and certainly now Prince Edward Island, have all these constitutional guarantees. Now if we have a system in which almost half the provinces—or in effect more, if we include the prairie provinces—are constitutionally protected from the principle of fairness and the principle of proportionality, at some point you will have a democratic problem. You will have a democratic crisis.

Essentially, by adopting this bill, we try to avoid that, and that's what we've been doing for 40 years now. Every time we do this redistribution, we say, well, we're going to put that off, let MPs deal with this 10 years from now, and we won't let the numbers change.

The reality is that under this bill, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island are all going to have a smaller share of the House of Commons. We're not changing that reality. We're reducing their share. We're just pretending we're not by not changing the number, so we're not facing up to it.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

I disagree with that. We can all understand simple math. I think we can all see it. The fact is, we're both elevating the numbers of the larger provinces, while maintaining some level of equilibrium between smaller provinces.

My concern from some testimony I have heard today—certainly in the first half—is that we seem to think of this country first as Ontario-Quebec. That seemed to satisfy some members when we look at seat redistribution. Then we add in British Columbia and Alberta, and then the rest are just considered to be parts of the federation, which aren't worthy to be included in this discussion. That troubles me—particularly when I see the Senate seats in the west, the six there—because I wonder how a federation works where the large provinces are moving towards representation by population, and the smaller provinces are just kind of shoved off and told they are all the same, even though they're actually all a little bit different.

I don't know if there's a comment to be made on that.

[Dr. Kenneth Carty]

The problem for the House of Commons is that we talk about it in terms of provinces, and maybe we should be thinking of it in terms of voters, if it's a democratic system. At what point do we want to sacrifice the principle of all voters counting equally? All Canadians choice of Prime Minister, of government, and of their member of Parliament ought to count the same. The reality is that they don't now, and they're a long way from it. This bill is going to change it a little bit, but it doesn't address the basic problem, because we don't really care about the principle. I think that's what we're saying.

I'm just challenging members to deal with this.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

You're over your four minutes. I think we're being generous.

Madam Charlton.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

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.

[Dr. Kenneth Carty]

As long as we have these constitutional guarantees that essentially make equal representation impossible—and that's what the Senate four for Prince Edward Island does—the circle can't be entirely squared. But we can come pretty close to it, if we abolish the grandfather clause and just redistribute the seats in all the other provinces—the large majority of them—and the vast majority of the population on a proportional basis.

I know, as a boundary commissioner, that in almost every single public hearing, we heard people saying, “You know, this isn't fair. You're giving us these large ridings in the north, but look at Prince Edward Island, they've got these tiny things. As a Canadian, you know, we're not being fairly represented”. I was actually quite struck, because I expected to hear, “Oh, well, Vancouver's getting it all, it's not fair”. But those weren't the kind of things I heard. Time and time again at public hearings there was, in fact, a kind of profound sense that the distribution across the country really wasn't fair and wasn't equal. People came to public hearings for boundary commissions because it was one of their few opportunities to make that point.

So the closer we can get to a kind of proportional allocation, the closer we can get to building a sense amongst all Canadians that their voices are more or less equally heard. I accept the fact that we can't do much about Prince Edward Island, unless we want to open the Constitution. I'm not here to advocate that.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Can you say a little bit, though, about your earlier comment that the House doesn't function any better now than it did when there were 265 seats, and maybe put that in a bit of a context by giving some of the other reasons for that? I don't believe it is merely a comment on the size of the House itself. There are other external factors that have had a profound impact. I just don't want members to leave this committee thinking that this act will either be the cure for that, or will make things even worse.

[Dr. Kenneth Carty]

I'm afraid you've asked for lecture number four in Political Science 101, which is a 50-minute exercise.

My view is that the House of Commons worked as well as it could in the context of the day in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. Increasing the size hasn't changed it in fundamental ways or made it better. I don't believe it's made members' capacity to represent their constituents fundamentally different. I've been observing members of Parliament and have known many of them over the years, and I don't think that every time we increase the size their jobs, they become better or that more citizens in downtown Vancouver or in rural corners of Kingston are better served. There's no evidence of that.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

But then there's also no evidence that it's been worse.

[Dr. Kenneth Carty]

No, I don't think so.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you.

Mr. Lukiwski, four minutes.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Let me say that what I'm hearing from the testimony of the professors, with the exception of Professor Pal and Professor Franks, is the suggestion that in some form or another we set an arbitrary number of MPs for the House of Commons. My view is that it would be just as wrong to set an arbitrary number of members of Parliament as it would to set an arbitrary number of professors in a post-secondary educational institution.

The inexorable fact is that the population will continue to grow in this country. I'm sure that as professors, all of you are concerned about the student-professor ratio and you want to be able to give the same level of service to your students. If your student population increased significantly, I'm sure that as an institution the university would be looking at increasing the number of professors to give the same level of service that it had prior to that.

I see nothing different in that from what we're doing here. In fact, I guess with the exception of Professor Franks, I would challenge any of the professors to say that they've done any kind of in-depth study on the type of constituency work that members of Parliament do. I agree totally with what Ms. Charlton and Mr. Comartin said previously, that the demands on members of Parliament are significant and will only increase if the number of people within our constituencies increases.

I feel quite comfortable in telling all professors that I take pride, as I'm sure every member of Parliament does, in giving as much attention and support as possible to individual constituents who come into my office. To me, the option of simply hiring more staff and giving casework to staff is not a proper one, nor would it suit the level of service demanded by constituents.

In summary, let me just say that I fully agree with Professor Franks. I think that in the larger scheme of things, the costs associated with increasing the numbers of members of Parliament are relatively insignificant given the costs of providing the level of service to constituents they deserve, as well as demand.

I think I have probably exhausted my four minutes, Mr. Chair, but—

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

You have a minute and a half left.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

—I do want to say that if any professor on the panel cares to comment on any type of study they've done on constituency work by members of Parliament, I would welcome that comment now.

[Dr. Louis Massicotte]

I can reassure the member that if the number of professors had increased to the extent that the number of students has increased, we would be many many more than we are at present. When I started teaching in 1992, for example, there were approximately 20 students in every undergraduate classroom. There are now over 100 in first year terms. So we have been able to deal with this, sir, and we have, I think, done it quite satisfactorily.

Is it because the population increases that the number of members is bound to increase indefinitely? I'm not so sure. Our neighbours to the south seem to have found it to be different. The size of the House of Representatives used to increase at every census and, at some point, exactly one century ago, in 1910, they decided to cap it at 435 and it is still at that level today.

Of course, the level of services provided by them has not fallen to small levels, as far as I know. It's simply that they were granted the necessary staff. They have the capacity to delegate work to other people, giving instructions, as we professors have to do. There are things that we used to do ourselves and now, because we have larger resources, we instruct people to do a few of the things that we used to do ourselves. I don't know, as I'm not in your position, but I understand that this would possibly mean capping the number of members at 308. It will, indeed, cause some inconvenience to members.

May I point out in finishing that there is nothing arbitrary about 308. It happens to be the exact size of the House at present.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

I guess the answer is no, you haven't done an in-depth study of the work members of Parliament for their constituents.

[Dr. Louis Massicotte]

We used to.

I'll give you this. I receive members every year in my seminar, precisely to overcome the dearth of academic literature on it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, professor.

We are at our time today.

We'll see each other on Thursday.

The meeting is adjourned.