Mr. Speaker, the Canadian Alliance supports this bill in principle. We believe the technology is there to allow seats to be updated for elections. We should be in tune with those things.
I did want to make a comment, however, on the speech I heard from the Bloc member today opposing the bill. I have a whole lot of difficulty with that point of view. The argument was that somehow Quebec was being left behind because of this bill. I guess in a democracy when representation is based on population we have to ask, is this bill the cause of the problem that we have in Quebec with the representation that the member was talking about? Is this the cause of it?
No, that is not the answer to the question. The answer is quite simply that that province has been preoccupied for the last 20 years with its fight for separatism. During that period of time the City of Montreal has lost its status in the country as our premiere city. Hockey teams have left the province. A baseball team is talking about leaving the province. Quebeckers are moving out of that province and the province is at a standstill. But also the governments that have been running that province have been socialistic governments. They have been preoccupied with big government, big spending, interfering in a major way in the day-to-day lives of people. And then they are surprised that their province has not gone anywhere and somehow this electoral boundaries issue is the reason why they are under-represented.
I think they are the author of their own misfortune. They should look in the mirror and they will find the reason why their province has not grown the way it should have. But hopefully they have turned a new leaf in that province and the province will be heading into growth.
For curiosity's sake I checked it out, Bloc members pay $10,000 more tax than Alberta MPs on their salaries. They pay $7,500 more in tax than Ontario MPs. A lot of members from the Bloc should be looking at Alberta and Ontario for the answer to their problems for a province that is growing sideways or backward and find a way to get the province jump-started and growing.
I want to raise another issue. We have had electoral financing debated in the House. We are dealing with boundaries now. That is an electoral reform as well. Speeding up that process and something that I feel very strongly about and that has been missing in this whole process is that most democracies legislate when elections are called.
In our country, the government wants to time the market. Liberals want the Prime Minister to have that ability to pick the optimal time for their own re-election. They do not want to legislate that sort of thing. Basically, if the legislation had dealt with this matter, and set terms and legislated the times for elections, we would not be involved with trying to push this through so the incoming Prime Minister would have the option to look at the most optimal period of time to call an election for his own best interest instead of the best interest for the country.
However, like all market timing, it has many perils and difficulties too and I suspect in this case the market timing measures that the government is looking at will backfire.
I want to comment about something that occurred in Saskatchewan in redrawing the boundaries. It is a point of contention that I have with the procedure that was employed in Saskatchewan. The whole process started with a dramatic alteration of the boundaries. The two major urban areas went from eight mixed ridings, rural-urban, to six urban ridings. Contrary to the Supreme Court ruling that basically said rural ridings should be the areas that have lower populations because it is tough to get fair and effective representation in a rural area because of its size and so on. They should have smaller seats in terms of population than urban areas.
This one started out with urban seats having 65,000 people and rural seats having 73,000 and 74,000 people. That is clearly contrary to the Supreme Court decision that dealt with this matter.
I tried to figure out how this proposed boundary in Saskatchewan got going and I certainly hit a stone wall. The member for Wascana, the Minister of Public Works, was an enthusiastic supporter of those boundaries. The member for Regina—Qu'Appelle, an NDP member, was also an enthusiastic supporter of that proposed boundary.
If we look at the last election results, it is interesting to see that both of those members received very poor support from the rural areas. In fact the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle almost lost his seat it was so narrow. It seems rather strange to me that we would create urban seats that fly in the face of the Supreme Court of Canada decision and create rural seats that just do not make any sense.
Fortunately, I have to give the commission credit. Mr. Justice Bayntonand the two appointees on the commission looked through all this stuff and listened to the people of those ridings. They went back to the original 14 seats that were only done in 1997. We had a million people in Saskatchewan then and we have a million today. Nothing had really changed in the demographics in the province.
The commission went back to the original boundaries, much to the disappointment I am sure of the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle and the member for Wascana, because they still have to deal with all the rural people who do not particularly like a lot of their policies and stands on things, such as the vote we had yesterday in the House of Commons. I know in rural Saskatchewan that is going to go over like a lead balloon with those folks. They will have to pay for it in the next election. They did not want that.
They wanted to dump all those rural people, get them off their backs and try to get a small urban seat that they thought they could manage their way through for another election. That is not going to happen. That whole strategy on their part is going to backfire and I am really looking forward to that day when the chickens come home to roost for those two members.