Madam Speaker, my colleague does raise an interesting point. There is no question that harm is done to democracy when people throw up their hands and say “Oh, well, the government will do whatever the government wishes”.
It is particularly disturbing, as I tried to indicate in my earlier remarks, because successive parliaments following Confederation in 1867 went back and forth on this issue. Whoever was in power had a tremendous opportunity to control the boundaries. The minority Parliament in 1964 dealt with that. I stand to be corrected, but I believe that since 1964, until these latest proposed boundary changes following a census, it seems to have worked fairly well. There has not been a lot of criticism. It looked like the 26th Parliament had done its job well and had eliminated the most blatant aspects.
Now all of a sudden we seem to be going backward. I think that people do wonder what the point is of getting involved in politics. It is the approach of “it does not matter who is elected, the government always wins”, like the old Irish proverb.
We in this caucus still think democracy matters. More important, we think this Parliament and this government ought to understand that it matters a great deal and make sure that what has happened in the boundary changes this time is never again allowed to occur.