Mr. Speaker, that is a very important point. However I should clarify something. My own personal travel time will decrease greatly because my riding will shrink geographically. Fantastically, it will now include part of the city of Edmonton. Elk Island will disappear and the new riding, which will replace it, will be part of Edmonton and it will be smaller. What I am talking about is the loss of constituents, who I have served for 10 years, because they will be cut out of the riding and put into other ridings. As an educator, how I wish I could use a white board or an overhead projector. I just feel so inhibited not have visual aids.
Instead of having ridings as compact as possible so members of Parliament can travel efficiently, those ridings will be long and narrow ridings. Members of Parliament will now have to travel from one area to an area much farther away in order to see his or her roughly 100,000 people in the riding. The riding next to it has the same organization.
I told the commission that this was mathematically very inefficient. We might as well have 301 ridings right across Canada and slice them up one mile wide right across the country and call those the ridings. Would that not be stupid? That of course is the extreme, but it illustrates what I am talking about.
The fact is that, yes, where we have a sparse population, as we do in rural parts of the prairies, it necessitates much more travel time. However it is not necessary to put everybody into that situation. It could be done with a bit of care so that at least travel time costs and other related things would be minimized.
The riding of Peace River, which is held by one of my colleagues, is about one-fourth of the whole province of Alberta and has well over the 100,000 average number of constituents in the country. That is wrong. The fact that such a large area should be compensated for by having a greater level of representation is wrong. Even under the present rules a variation is permitted but I think it should be utilized. There again, the commission in Alberta totally failed to take that into account.
I should also add that the commission could have done much better if it had done a little more work. It heard very clearly from the witnesses during its investigation, at least during the Edmonton one that I attended. All the commission had to do was go back to the drawing board and it could have done a much better job, but for some reason it decided not to.
The submissions that were made by members of Parliament to the parliamentary committee, with the recommendations going back to the Alberta commission, were, in every instance, rejected even though the commission heard the arguments and concurred with a number of them.
Now that it is set in stone and cannot be changed, I now feel the freedom to roundly criticize the commissioner and the commission in Alberta for having done what I believe to be a totally inadequate job.