I've gone through this three times, and it's been traumatic every time. The problem was that in northern Ontario we had to prove to very doubting commissioners that we had a right to representation, so we started with a flawed premise.
In 2010 the decision was that they were just going to rip the agricultural region apart because agriculture didn't matter and they were looking at numbers. There was a huge blowback. We had hundreds and hundreds of letters to say that the Highway 11 agricultural region had to be maintained because it was growing. This is a growing region. They're all connected economically, culturally and politically.
We brought that up, and we assumed in the first round that this region wasn't going to be ripped apart, because they were ripping everything else apart. Then in the second round they ripped the agricultural region in half to make up for their arbitrary thing.
The problem is that we have no ability to come to the table fair and square, because we don't know what the rules of the game are. We know we have to prove...and then they say, “Well, these are the rules.” We quote the Supreme Court and we quote the legislation, but we're never given the chance to lay out and discuss what are fair questions. How should ridings be set up? None of our ridings make sense, but we are never at the table; we're always playing defence.