Mr. Speaker, I listened very carefully to the three speakers from the Reform Party and their rationale for wanting to abort the process we are proposing in the House of Commons. I am somewhat shocked at some of the things I heard. Here is a party that purports to want to save taxpayers' money. They are talking about increasing by six the numbers of representation in the House of Commons. We know it costs at least a million dollars a year for every member of the House. I have great difficulty in how they rationalize that.
I would like to get back to the previous speaker concerning the fact that there has not been any public input into this matter. I wonder how much public input there was into the electoral commission. If I could use the example of the province of Newfoundland, it has had a population increase in the last 10 years of something like 600 people. Yet the boundaries of every riding in the province of Newfoundland have been redistributed at great cost to the Canadian taxpayer. I wonder how much consultation there was with the people of Newfoundland.
There is no doubt in my mind that British Columbia needs a redistribution of its boundaries so that the ones with the heavily populated areas are shifting some over to the less populated areas. My colleagues in the city of Toronto will probably have by the next election 300,000 electors in their ridings. That is an incredible burden for those members of Parliament.
If we look at the ridings in the national capital region how can we justify this shifting? They are not increasing anything. They are not doing anything. They are just shifting and creating additional costs.
How can the previous speaker, as a member of the Reform Party who is constantly and consistently preaching restraint to this side of the House, talk about expending millions and millions and millions of taxpayers' dollars because of recommendations by a commission that never consulted in the first place?