Mr. Speaker, I always take heart, and it happens so frequently in the House as the previous hon. member mentioned, in talking about privileges of the House. The other thing that always impresses me is how passionately every member speaks about his or her own riding as they introduce the subject of what it is that makes their riding. Often it is called a microcosm of the Canadian identity. Often each member in their own way does represent that here in the House and it is always encouraging to me when I hear members talking with pride about their constituencies. Of course I do extend an invitation to you, especially since last week it was 24 degrees in Fraser Valley East. But I do not want to rub that in.
I do want to address the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Suspension Act and also our proposed Reform Party amendments to it which I think would make it more palatable to Canadians and to those of us who are concerned with certain parts of this suspension procedure.
There is of course a huge boundary readjustment of my own that I am faced with in Fraser Valley East. The boundaries have now been extended to include the Merritt-Princeton area of the interior of B.C. It would make a logistical nightmare in some senses for me to try to service a riding that has three separate highways, each with one small town at the end of it. It would be very difficult.
I think it is important that we deal with the principle involved, not my own personal feelings about whether I agree with the adjustments in my own riding, in boundary alignments and readjustments. That is what I would like to address here this morning.
There are five particular reasons why I think this bill should never become law. First, I believe it thwarts the purpose of Parliament in the electoral process. The Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act requires the readjustment of the federal electoral boundaries every 10 years. That is a requirement of an act of Parliament that has already been passed.
The first eight sections of the act deal with the appointment of the commissions that will decide these issues for the provinces and how those commissions are made up, how they are appointed and so on.
The important thing is that these commissions have almost a judicial impartiality. It is important that they have the freedom to make choices based on the impartiality that they supposedly have based on the requirements of the act.
When the Speaker or the chief justice of each province appoints someone to the commission, those are almost judicial positions. We have to accept that they are without prejudice. I believe we have to go along with their ideas at least as it fits into the process or else we thwart the purpose of Parliament.
Parliament specifically and importantly prohibits anyone in the Senate or anyone who is a member of Parliament from being part of that commission. The reason of course is because they do not want political interference. They do not want the partisanship that could enter into electoral boundary redistribution to be a part of it. It has to be impartial and it has to be seen to be impartial.
The timeliness of these changes is also important to me.
It states in section 13 of the act that as soon as possible after the completion of any decennial census, which is every 10 years, the chief statistician gives a report to the chief electoral officer and they calculate the seats and so on. The important thing here is the timeliness. As soon as possible after a census we need to make our redistribution so that we can more accurately reflect the needs of the shifting populations and so on in each of the provinces. "Then each commission shall prepare", it says under section 14, "with all reasonable dispatch a report."
The last census was in 1991, which is already going back three years, and so timeliness has already been thwarted once, I believe, by the last Parliament because it suspended the act for two years. That is not a big thing in some people's minds, but again it thwarts an impartial boundary readjustment. I am very nervous when parliamentarians interfere with what I believe should be an independent body and an independent report.
All boundaries were supposed to be redrawn as soon as possible after 1991. The last bill, C-67, halted the whole process. All 11 government commissions were eliminated. It was a total waste of their time and effort and the money involved.
I wonder why at this time we have to again dive into this process and shut the whole thing down again, with another $5 million being spent. I can only speculate. I know the new boundaries may be inconvenient but they are inconvenient for us all. Politics never was totally convenient. It could be that MPs
have to make new political contacts as their boundaries are shifted. Be that as it may, that is also part of this impartiality. It could even include boundaries in some areas that traditionally vote against the member. Some areas vote stronger for certain parties than others. Possibly that has caused some concern on the government side.
I am not sure what it is but regardless of how you slice it we are three years late already in what was supposed to be a very timely thing and now we are going to put it off for another two years, which means there will be another election and so on.
I think it is a mistake to keep putting off what should be an independent-I repeat independent-review. Our first amendment to this bill is that we should bring in a report. If we are going to have this interference, we should at least have it in place for the next federal election.
I am concerned about B.C. which is the fastest growing province and which already should have an extra two or three seats. We are going to go into the next century with the same number of seats and the same distribution that we had in 1981. Since 1981 we have had from within Canada alone over 40,000 people move to B.C., mainly from Ontario. There is a shift in population westward. There are 35,000 additional people who came from overseas. We get 20 per cent of all Canada's immigrants. B.C.'s population continues to grow at a faster rate than the rest of Canada and yet we are going to be stuck with a proportional representation that is mired in the 1980s.
People in B.C. have mentioned that this is unfair, it is not proportional representation, and it is going to skew the power base away from the growing population centres and leave it in the eastern areas, some of which have been nice enough to send us their people to populate B.C.
I am not sure if that is the intention of the government in bringing this in. I am not sure if it is concerned about maintaining a power base where it happens to have most of its seats. I am not sure exactly why it has been done.
I come back to the idea of impartiality, that Canadians have to accept and have to know with regard to boundary readjustments and the way this is put together that the people who sit on the commission are not political hacks. They are not doing things for the favour or the benefit of any one party. They are doing it truly for the benefit of the democratic process. I think that is thwarted, especially by delaying it for two years, which means another election that we would have to go through.
I support our first amendment which would bring it forward in a more timely fashion and would allow us to get on with whatever changes the government deems necessary in time for the next election. That could take some of the sting out of this. Some of the waste and so on would be easier to accept if we knew that a timely settlement of some sort was in the government's mind. I wish it would consider that first amendment thoughtfully.
I mentioned earlier the whole idea of cost. All the commission's work and the money spent in 1991 and 1992 were wasted. On the current process all of us received in the mail or saw in the newspapers a proposal for boundary readjustments. I have already asked to make a submission to the commission about boundary readjustments. I have some ideas, and all of us are free to make presentations to them.
Those meetings have been set up. They have been advertised. The entire newspaper propaganda idea through which all these ideas were sent to every Canadian household has taken place at huge expense. That expense is all for nought. It is a waste of the commissioners' time and it is a waste of our money.
I realize that $5 million is not the end of the world in some people's minds, but as a couple of people coming out of Parliament once said, a billion here and a billion there soon adds up to real money. Possibly government should consider that every $5 million is a significant amount of money, not just a chunk of change.
For all of the reasons that I mentioned earlier and especially because this has been done behind closed doors and brought in by closure and so on, it leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. I hope the government will accept an amendment that will bring it in before the next election and restore faith in the impartiality of our Electoral Boundaries Commission.