Mr. Speaker, there is a genuine problem with representation in Canada and with the loss of representation by population in the House of Commons.
As the formula is currently structured, all the provinces with the exception of Ontario, Alberta and B.C. have their numbers frozen due to a variety of formulae, one that says no province shall have fewer members of Parliament than it has senators and another that says no province shall have fewer members of Parliament than it had in 1985. Since seven provinces fit within the category covered by those two provisions, the result is that seven provinces are no longer under the representation by population formula. That is a very severe problem, and it is one which one might have hoped this bill would address.
However, it does not do so, quite frankly. Instead, it worries about what I regard as an almost immaterial problem: the problem of the number of members of Parliament. I am not sure on what basis we think it would be a problem if we had, as the sponsor of the bill says, the population of the United States, in how we would deal with formula.
We are not going to have the population of the United States, now or at any time in the near future. Given the fact that the representation formula has been amended on average once every decade or two over the past century, I am not too worried that by the time we achieve the population the Americans currently have, if we ever do, we will not have had an opportunity to come up with a formula to address it. But this formula does not do it. It worries about capping the numbers in the House of Commons at 308.
Just to give an idea of how bad the current formula is, right now Quebec's population is only marginally larger than the combined populations of British Columbia and Alberta. Quebec has 75 seats, but the two westernmost provinces have a combined total of only 64. Manitoba and Saskatchewan have the same number of seats that Alberta does despite the fact that their combined populations are a million less than Alberta's.
The right way to address this problem would be to change the formula to allow the size of the House of Commons to grow to ensure that Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario citizens are not underrepresented. That would involve a larger number of members of Parliament, not the astronomical number the member is talking about but a somewhat modestly larger number. That is all it would require.
That would produce representation by population for our larger provinces and their residents who are currently underrepresented, a matter about which I feel deeply because, in the entire country, I happen to represent the constituency in which the largest number of votes were cast in the last election, 63,600, which means that, by way of example, a vote in my riding of Lanark--Carleton was worth one-sixth as much it was in the riding of Labrador where only 10,300 votes were cast.
I do not mean to suggest that we ought to cut the number of seats for Newfoundland or adjust the boundaries of the riding of Labrador or in Prince Edward Island or any other province where the population is protected by existing formulae. What I do mean to suggest is that we ought to say representation by population is more important than some abstruse principle like the sacred size of the House of Commons at 308, which has grown to twice the size it had when Canada came into existence and which is only currently half the size of the House of Commons in London on which we are based, which incidentally is in a smaller room than this one. So it is very easy to deal with kind of thing in a fair and principled manner.
The bill says that rule 2 of the current law on representation, section 51 of the Constitution, would be changed, specifically, the rule that currently states that for the total number of the members of the House of Commons the formula will be adjusted to ensure that a bottom is kept for smaller provinces. That is to ensure that no province drops below the number of seats it had in 1985. The bill states that this rule will be removed and will be replaced by this cap of 308.
I tried doing a little calculation based on the member's bill. What we would have to do is use rule 1 of section 51 of the current Constitution, which is an odd rule. It says:
There shall be assigned to each of the provinces a number of members equal to the number obtained by dividing the total population of the provinces by two hundred and seventy-nine--
Why 279? Because that was the number of members in the House of Commons at one point and the rule was fixed at that. Rule 1 continues:
--and by dividing the population of each province by the quotient so obtained, counting any remainder in excess of 0.50 as one after the said process of division.
We need a calculator to go through this. Let us do this and then throw in the rule proposed by the hon. member, which would cap the number at 308. I tried working through his formula. There are several different ways to do formulae under his proposal and, presumably if this were passed, they would wind up being the source of constitutional litigation. But I think we can start by dividing the population of Canada, minus the territories, by 279. That gives us a quotient of 107,219. Then we divide the population of each province by the resulting number. But we have to start a secondary calculation in which we subtract the populations of provinces where the population is below a number that would result in them losing the protection they get by the guarantee in the Constitution that they will not have fewer seats in the House than they have in the Senate.
This is not said in his rule but I assume this is what is meant, because his amendment to the Constitution does not remove the Senate floor. So we would have to remove Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, P.E.I. and Newfoundland and Labrador from that total, recalculate, and also, I assume, subtract the number of seats they hold, although his amendment does not say that either. This means that now we would divide 27,628,586 by 275 with a resulting number of 100,467. That is the size of the average riding in all these provinces.
This produces the following results based on the 2001 census. There are some differences between the representation we currently have in the House. Instead of 7 seats in Newfoundland and Labrador, there would be 6. Instead of 11 seats in Nova Scotia, there would be 10. Instead of 75 seats in Quebec, there would be 72. In Ontario, we would go up from the 106 we now have to 113. Alberta would go up by one and British Columbia also would go up slightly.
I also took the liberty of taking a look at Statistics Canada projections for the year 2021, or what it refers to as its medium growth projections, for populations of the various provinces in the census that will take place 15 or 16 years from now, in order to get a sense of what results we would get at that time in terms of representation.
I will not go through a list of all the provinces, but I would point to a few highlights: Newfoundland and Labrador remains at 6 instead of the 7 it is at currently; Nova Scotia remains at 10 instead of the 11 it is at currently; Quebec drops from 75 seats to 59 seats; and Saskatchewan drops from its current 14 seats to 8 seats. Members get the picture. There is a substantial redistribution.
In a way, the member's bill would achieve part of what I have said we ought to have in our representation here in the House, which is representation by population. He has done it by capping the number of ridings, allowing their size to greatly increase and raising the size of ridings not merely in places like Ontario and B.C., where they are going to grow anyway, but also in Quebec, Saskatchewan and elsewhere.
I suggest, based upon our history, that this has never been acceptable to Canadians. The reason we have a provision in our Constitution that says there will be a floor on the number of seats based upon the number of seats in the Senate is that around the time of the first world war Prince Edward Island was on the verge of losing the number of seats it had. There was a great deal of consternation on the Island, so that rule was set in place.
The reason that we have 75 seats in Quebec right now is because of a problem that occurred in the 1940s, when Ontario's number of seats was going to decline unless the number of seats for Quebec was raised to 75 from the 65 it had been allocated. The number of seats was raised to permit Ontario's representation not to drop. The reason that Quebec has 75 instead of some smaller number now is because of a later change made in the 1970s to ensure that it would not drop.
What I am driving at here is that there is a legitimate problem with representation by population being lost. It already is lost in the House of Commons, to some degree. That problem gets worse and worse in the future under the current formula, but the proposal the member is putting forward I believe addresses this in a way that history shows is unacceptable to Canadians and, therefore, I suggest, would be rejected by them. And I will go further: I think it should be rejected by them.