Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have a few minutes to speak to Bill C-49. It should be obvious to everyone in the country that this particular bill has only one purpose and that is to allow the new boundaries to be in place by April 1 instead of the day in August which it would normally be.
To have this bill in front of us now is simply a concession to the wannabe Prime Minister so that he can call an election early before people have a chance to really look at him and examine what he stands for and what his performance has been in the House of Commons. It is about an early election. That is really what it is about.
I certainly cannot object on the grounds of the fact that it gives Alberta a little more of the representation that it is entitled to by population. But I would like to talk about what is actually happening in the re-drawing of the boundaries.
I am in the Edmonton area and in Edmonton we were very distressed, all of us, when we went to the committee. I went the day of the hearings in Edmonton and I sat there all day to hear the presentations. Every presentation, save one, was against what the committee was doing. That one was from a town nearby that used to be in the Elk Island riding before the boundaries were changed in 1997. The only reason that presentation was put forward was so that the riding would have a member of Parliament who would now be physically closer to it. It is impossible to have all people close to their members of Parliament.
Instead of hearing all of those individuals, including the presentation from the city of Edmonton that said it would rather have six members of Parliament in the City of Edmonton who would represent the city than eight members of Parliament with divided interests, instead of listening to that message which it heard over and over, the committee decided in its report to give reasons why it should not hear this and so it was ignored.
Furthermore, it has changed the boundaries in such a way that we will now spend hours and hours sitting in our vehicles. Instead of having compact constituencies, it has divided them up into long, narrow constituencies so that we will spend hours in our vehicles instead of doing our work. I object to that very strenuously.
I will support this motion and vote for it in the end, but I want to urge the government to look seriously at this process because it seems to me that what is being done is politically motivated. How else can one explain arranging the constituencies so that it makes it more difficult for the member of Parliament to be an effective member of Parliament and spend good time with people in the riding? This is what has happened in this particular case and I really deplore it.
On the other hand, Elk Island will disappear. No longer will you be able to say, Madam Speaker, “the hon. member for Elk Island”. That riding will be gone according to the new boundaries and the new one will be called Edmonton--Sherwood Park, which is the main town in my riding. I may put in a suggestion to add another town which is not insignificant.
The fact of the matter is that we will do our very best as members of Parliament in the Canadian Alliance to represent the people in whatever ridings we get. We will work hard to do that, but I am really sad that this commission did so much damage in our effectiveness.
The riding where I now live extends 200 miles. It goes right alongside another one that is 200 miles long. Why should we have two members of Parliament waving at each other on the highway as they go back and forth to meetings in their ridings? That is a useless waste of a member of Parliament's time to just sit in a vehicle and drive. We have no other means of transportation there that can be used.