Mr. Speaker, I am convinced I will not have to invite you to come and visit my riding since you must have been there already on skiing vacations. The riding of Laurentides has 43 municipalities and 110,000 voters. It is a huge riding but the new electoral map brings appalling cuts to this area. Without any reason, several municipalities will be taken from my riding and will become part of a neighbouring one.
You must understand that the riding of Laurentides is located along a highway, highway 15 or 117. It is a network, a tourist region and it is therefore very important that the area be maintained as a whole and remain united. If you take municipalities out of a tourist network, it becomes very difficult for those municipalities to make a name for themselves in another riding which may be, for instance, agricultural or something else.
I would like to tell you about municipalities that are very disturbed by the new electoral map and which approached me and explained their problem. You have Mont-Tremblant which is booming and must count on the touristic network of my riding to be able to advertise and attract tourists. If Mont-Tremblant became part of Berthier-Montcalm, which is a totally different kind of riding, the people of Berthier-Montcalm would be hard pressed when it comes to the economic development of Mont-Tremblant. Furthermore, they object to Mont-Tremblant being taken out of my riding.
The town of Saint-Jovite along highway 117 and all those towns to the north, including Labelle, which are part of the tourism network, are being removed and added to Argenteuil-Papineau, which has an entirely different focus. So, of course, the mayors, the councillors and my constituents called and said: What can we do? We do not want to leave the riding of Laurentides. We feel at home here. We do not want to be part of another riding where they may be too busy to look after us, because it takes a long time to cover the whole riding. I have a very big riding with a lot of constituents, and it takes a lot of travelling, but we have a network where everything connects. In fact, we used to have the "petit train du Nord", a train that went through all the municipalities now in my riding. Where the train used to run has now been turned into parkland.
If part of this tourism network is removed and added to another riding which is different again, it will make the park far less attractive because the park needs the Laurentides Tourism Association and the services in my riding to develop as it should.
I am against the amendment, and I think the readjustment process was a hasty affair. They took a map and looked at the number of constituents in a given riding. They decided there should be 75,000 inhabitants per riding, so they take this particular part out and add it on somewhere else. Some ridings have a lot of small municipalities with very few people, but the member may end up with 70 municipalities in the same riding. This does not make sense. A member can never do a good job under those circumstances. To do a good job, the redistribution process must be reasonable. There should also be a good infrastructure.
I know some people in my riding who told me during the election campaign: So I am in Laurentides? I said yes, you belong to the riding of Laurentides. They were not aware of this.
It takes a few years for people to get used to belonging to a riding or to identify with the riding. Shifting people from one riding to the next every eight years does not create a sense of community.
I am also against reducing the number of members, because we already have 110,000 constituents and if we get more, I am going to have trouble looking after everyone. It already takes two and a half hours to drive across the riding. It takes me longer to drive from one end of the riding to the other than it takes to drive to Ottawa. These are huge distances.
The tourism network is in good shape, and people want to stay in that network. I will keep doing my job in my riding. I think it is very important for people to identify with a region. I think it is very important for a region's development. I intend to go on working with my constituents, and if these electoral boundaries have to be changed, the municipalities concerned and I-in fact, I would lose a large number of municipalities which have already been identified-will take steps to prepare a brief and protest against changes that make no sense at all in a region where municipalities need each other to survive.
You know that when people go to Saint-Sauveur, they will also visit another municipality next door. They will see a show in Val-David and have dinner in Sainte-Agathe or go boating there. In this region, we all have to help each other. Otherwise, if you take a few small municipalities and destroy their tourism network or move it somewhere else, you lose the dynamics that tourism needs, because this is not an easy sector.
I will go on doing my job in my beautiful riding of Laurentides, and as far as breaking up the riding is concerned, I will do my utmost to keep that from happening.