moved for leave to introduce Bill C-372, an act to amend the Constitution Act, 1867.
Mr. Speaker, I introduced toward the end of the last parliament a private member's bill, Bill C-385. The election took place before the bill was called.
Today I keep the commitment I made publicly to my constituents to reintroduce the bill in the 36th Parliament if re-elected. The bill is seconded by my colleague, the hon. member for Victoria—Haliburton.
The purpose of the bill is to cap the size of the House of Commons at the current 301 members. Obviously redistribution would still occur but within that cap. The bill would replace subsection 51(1), rule 2 of the Constitution Act, 1867, which would see the size of the House increase indefinitely.
One only has to do the math to realize that if we had a population the size of the U.S.A., under our current rules some day we would have 3,000 members of Parliament. Clearly that is not an acceptable number of MPs.
The bill seeks to cap the size of the House and to respect that most basic and fundamental rule of representation by population.
(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)