It is in Calgary Centre right now, and the commission is proposing to take it out and put it in Signal Hill, to the left. Severing these communities all the way from north to south has no persuasive argument at all, and it disrupts all these relationships and common interests and concerns that are inside the ring road where the communities do share commonalities. A primary goal of redistribution should be to maintain strong communities and also enable them to be well served by Ottawa.
That brings us to number three, which is putting together strange bedfellows. I've already talked a bit about this but on the west side, the Signal Hill riding, which we just talked about, has very few ties to Calgary Centre, which is sort of more of a working class area. Signal Hill is kind of tony and upper class. That's where they built the condos for the Olympic Village, etc. This topographical difference is also a very significant one because it means there is virtually no traffic flow on a daily basis between the neighbourhoods inside the ring road and outside the ring road.
Furthermore, the provincial ridings of Calgary-Elbow and Calgary-Currie both use Sarcee Trail as their boundary, and this is recognizing the things I've talked about. We propose the boundary should be east-west from Sarcee Trail as much as is humanly possible. Instead of severing the riding from north to south, if you need to take some land out of it, you make the line east-west and at least keep the communities of interest together.
You'll see in your package something that looks like this, which is what we're proposing. The reason we propose you take the chunk out at the top is, if you look up behind you, you'll see there already is a chunk along the river that's a part of Signal Hill, so we're at least keeping some of the communities of interest there together on an east-west basis.
Finally, on the east side, this is where we've really added strange bedfellows. As much I love them, we have the communities of Ramsay and Inglewood, which have always operated independently from the downtown. I don't know if you can see on my map, but there's a river that goes through on the green map, and the communities of Inglewood and Ramsay are on the other side of the river. Because of that, they have always been very separate from downtown. The provincial and municipal riding boundaries, again, are the river. They are also separated from downtown by three bridges, the Stampede grounds, an industrial area, and the railway yard. It makes no sense to add those into Calgary Centre.
As well, the boundaries commission has also added a very large industrial yard down here into Calgary Centre, which really makes it almost ungovernable. From the point of view of the federal government, you've already got one of the most populist ridings in the country. You have the second largest head office capital in the country and all of those people need to be served. You have some of the largest homeless shelters. You have a huge immigrant population that's moving in every year to that riding. And you also have all of your suburban communities. Why add a big industrial yard into that mix and expect it to be well served? The riding of Calgary Shepard, into which we're proposing you put it, can take the population. There's very little population there. The riding of Calgary Shepard includes the large, industrial area that the riding is actually named for.
That's the end of my presentation, Mr. Chair.