Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Calgary North has made an interesting speech based on the principle of public representation, arguing that the people should be able to make representations on how the new federal ridings would be redistributed.
I think this is an excellent point and it would be great if all the various communities within a riding were homogenous instead of having totally divergent interests as is often the case at present.
I would like to ask the hon. member for Calgary North the following question. You can see the size of this chamber. A few years ago, ten, fifty, a hundred years ago, there certainly were not 295 members sitting here. Not so long ago, there were about 250. There used to be 200 and, before that, perhaps 150. Today, we are 295 and we are about to add another six, at a cost of approximately $9 million, $10 million or $12 million.
So, I can see two problems. One is that, at this rate, there will come a point, in 2050 or 2090, where this chamber will no longer be large enough to hold all the new members. Walls will have to be moved back to make room for the extra seats that will have to be made. If you look to the south, in the United States, they have only 100 senators for a total population of about 250 million.
My riding is huge. It is currently the fourth largest of all urban and rural ridings in Canada, and I am not complaining. I am rather proud of it. I think that there is a way, when you how, to represent your riding well and not lose touch with the community.
I am sure that the hon. member has noticed that in Prince Edward Island, they have ridings-and I do not mean any disrespect; I am merely stating a fact-which are no larger than certain neighbourhoods in cities like Calgary or here, in the Ottawa area. They have four members of Parliament representing 135,000 people, and I do mean people as opposed to voters. There are probably no more than 20,000 to 25,000 voters in some of these ridings, and even that is generous. Now, there is a problem there, but the province and its right to be represented have to be respected. This is a case where we would have to refer to the Constitution.
For those of us from other parts of the country where there are no such guarantees, is this room not getting a little crowded? And have our national debt and public debt not grown so much that we should act to curb the growth of the number of elected members?