Madam Chair, I thank the honourable member for his question.
You have seen this in the earlier commentary by Professor Taillon. There is in the development of this legislation an attempt to balance and reconcile different aspects of our federation.
The first is the issue of what is sometimes called “representation by population” and sometimes called “proportionate representation”. That is clearly a defining feature of the legislation, but the other feature of the legislation is to provide protections to small and slower-growing provinces to make sure they get adequate representation.
When we developed the advice for the minister, we considered options that attempted to balance those two things. I only looked at it briefly so the honourable member will forgive me if I have it slightly wrong, but I think he was providing an illustrative example that if those provinces had the same representation as Quebec, that would be the number of seats they would have.