Debates of Nov. 10th, 2006

The House resumed from September 28 consideration of the motion that Bill C-290, An Act to amend the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act (Northern Ontario), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, one of the key principles of democracy is that the vote of every citizen should hold exactly the same weight as the vote of every other citizen. This principle which was encapsulated in George Brown's famous slogan, “Representation by population”, was a foundation stone of the Confederation deal of 1867. Today we should do all that we can to prevent this principle from being watered down.

Bill C-290 directly undermines representation by population. The bill would entrench one value for votes cast by Ontarians living north of Lake Nipissing and another value, about 20% lower, for votes cast in the rest of the province. The bill would cause this inequity to expand over time. Bill C-290 would do this by amending the Canada Elections Act so that northern Ontario would never be represented in the House of Commons by fewer than 10 MPs. Before explaining the implications of the bill, I will describe Ontario's electoral status quo.

Northern Ontario's current population is 838,000 and it has 10 seats. The rest of the province has a population of 10,572,000 and it has 96 seats. If the principle of representation by population had been followed, the division would have been eight seats for the north and 98 seats for everyone else, but two seats that should have been allocated south of Lake Nipissing were instead placed north of the lake.

It is mathematically impossible to overrepresent one group of voters in a province without partially disenfranchising every other voter in that province. Effectively therefore, the current distribution of Ontario ridings takes away some of the value of each voter's franchise south of Lake Nipissing and gives it to the voters to the north.

Specifically, the current seat distribution has the following consequences. One, the average population of the 10 ridings north of the lake is 83,800. Two, the population of the average riding in the rest of the province is 110,000. This is 2.2% higher than it would have been if those two extra seats had not been awarded to the north. Three, as a consequence of this, the vote of every elector living south of Lake Nipissing is worth 24% less than the vote of a northern Ontarian.

That is the status quo. By making this arrangement permanent, Bill C-290 would be almost certain to make the situation even more inequitable. If, as the bill's sponsor seems to assume, the population growth in areas south of the lake continues to outstrip growth in northern Ontario at the current rate, Bill C-290 would have the practical impact every 10 years of stripping away another 1% from the value of every vote in every riding south of Lake Nipissing, since with each redistribution, the rest of Ontario would be deprived of an additional riding which under the terms of the bill would be reserved for the north.

I suppose one could argue that systematically underweighting votes by 2% or even 3% or 4% as contemplated by the bill is a trivial matter. Perhaps it is trivial for anyone of us in so far as our vote goes, but there are 10.5 million Canadians living south of Lake Nipissing and when so many voters are even partly disenfranchised, it is simply undemocratic and it is wrong.

Mr. Speaker, if you are planning on overturning one of the foundation stones of democracy, it behooves you to have powerful reasons. I confess that I do not find the arguments presented thus far in defence of Bill C-290 to be particularly compelling. As far as I can tell, Bill C-290 appears to be based on three premises. I will list each of them in turn, pointing out my reservations as I go.

The first premise behind the bill seems to be that the primary function of a member of Parliament is to be a local service provider and solver of constituency problems with the logical consequence that voting in the House of Commons on behalf of constituents is a secondary role. After all, if the primary role of MPs is to provide equitable representation for the people of Canada in this place, it becomes impossible to justify such anomalies as the existence since the last redistribution of one Ontario riding, Kenora, which in order to compensate for its very large geographical size, has been assigned boundaries that give it a population 40% smaller than the provincial average.

In the first hour of debate the member for Kenora was one of the most eloquent defenders of Bill C-290. A glance at Hansard reveals that he and the bill's sponsor spoke at length about the challenges of geography but not a word about the merits of having all votes within Ontario be of equal value.

I take very seriously my own role as a service provider in my riding, but it is my view that if it were possible to provide a better level of service to my own constituents at the cost of imposing permanent partial disenfranchisement on the voters of the rest of Ontario, this would not be a justifiable trade-off.

It goes without saying that I do not support the first premise behind Bill C-290. Even if I did, the bill would still not be intellectually defensible unless I were also to subscribe to a second premise.

This premise holds that in very sparsely populated regions where ridings are necessarily very large, a substantially better level of MP service to constituents can be provided when the population of the riding is reduced by 20% or 30%. After all, if the problems of service provision are not resolved by putting a few extra MPs on the ground in northern Ontario, there is no value in giving extra ridings to the region.

I do not agree with this premise any more than I did with the first one, but I will take a moment to review some of the words presented in favour of this premise during the first hour of debate before stating my objections.

The member for Kenora was quite explicit that this was his reason for endorsing the bill. He said that northern Ontario is “a massive chunk of land and deserves to have MPs serving it. It has 10 right now and it needs to remain at that”. The member then went on to point out that Kenora is not only the largest riding in Ontario, it is also the eighth largest in the country.

He described some of the practical difficulties involved in servicing the more remote parts of his riding. He pointed out that the communities are far apart and in particular that 21 of them can be reached only by air. I would like to focus on this particular point for a moment because I believe that it reveals what is wrong with the premise that more MPs would lead to better service. I will start by quoting the member verbatim. He said:

[Kenora has] 21 fly-in communities.... [T]here are rules in the House of Parliament where we can only travel for four days in our ridings. For me to go to those communities, it takes 21 days straight. I have to go home continually because I have to start the four day cycle again. If we took the population ratio that we try to use now [for the rest of the province], I would probably have 50 or 60 [fly-in communities]. How could anyone possibly service that?

The member raised a good point. It may be the case that rules that forbid an MP to travel for more than four days in his riding and charge the expense to the member's office budget should be re-examined. However, the member's assertion that he would have 50 fly-in communities if the population of the riding of Kenora were increased is simply incorrect.

Prior to the last redistribution, the predecessor riding to Kenora was considerably more populous because it included the Rainy River district. But in relative terms, this area was heavily populated so it added only 5% to the area of the riding and had no fly-in communities. This perhaps is why Bob Nault, the MP for the old riding of Kenora--Rainy River, so strenuously opposed the creation of the smaller new riding that now exists. He told a committee of the House of Commons:

[The argument is made that Kenora--Rainy River] is too large for the Member of Parliament to service it. I take exception to that, of course. I've been its member for 15 years, and I think we do a pretty good job of managing our way around the riding.... [Red Lake is] basically the end of the road, and from here on up are totally isolated first nation communities. The only way you can get there is by air and/or winter road. So [the southern part] is basically the part I drive to in the summertime--

From Mr. Nault's comments we learn that the successful servicing of a large riding requires good management skills. He made reference to the winter roads that let him get to some of the less remote fly-in communities. He indicated that he serviced the non-remote parts of his riding by driving around in the same manner as any other MP.

I know from personal experience that it really is difficult to service a widely spread riding. It takes over two hours to drive from one end of my riding to the other. Here is how we handle things and any MP can do the same thing: One, we rented two offices at two ends of the riding; two, one of my office managers, John Campsall, holds regular mobile constituency offices at community halls in more remote areas; and three, we set up a 1-800 number so that constituents can call us from anywhere without paying long distance fees.

I mention all of this to make the point that all of the problems that are represented as being unique to northern Ontario are in fact endemic to all large ridings and in some cases, are worse in genuinely rural ridings with no large centres than in large wilderness ridings with one or two large centres. The largest centre of population in my riding has a population of less than 10,000. By contrast, in Kenora the largest centre has a population of 16,000.

The solution to this problem and to the unique problem of remote communities which is a problem in northern Ontario is not to guarantee a minimum number of MPs to any region, but rather to examine whether the supplemental budget provided by the House of Commons for MPs with large ridings is too small. Currently this amount sits at $35,000 for Kenora and about $250,000 for all of northern Ontario.

The upshot of this is I do not think that premise one or premise two hold water, but even if we subscribed to both, that would only provide justification for a bill for making large rural ridings less populous than geographically compact urban ridings. It would not provide justification for the present bill which seeks to make all northern ridings, including that of the bill's sponsor, the riding of Sudbury, which is one-tenth the size of my riding, less populous.

If we want to get involved in making rural ridings larger, frankly I do not think it is justifiable, but that would involve a different bill and the defeat of this bill. As I have said before, I do not believe that it is appropriate to sacrifice one of the cornerstones of democracy on the altar of better constituent services. That can be dealt with by other means, as I have outlined in my remarks.

[Monique Guay, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today about the Act to amend the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act (Northern Ontario).

I would like to start by saying that we will vote against this bill, because we believe that every voter has one vote and that this bill would change that. This is unacceptable to us.

As I said previously, the principle is one person, one vote. I think that the member who introduced this bill, the member for Sudbury, has a problem in her region, and we understand that. We also have a problem in Quebec. When the commission did its work, we lost two ridings for the 2004 election, one in Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean and the other on the North Shore, because of population migration to larger centres. We no longer had four, but three ridings in Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean.

This causes problems, obviously. We went through it, and we are living with the consequences on the parliamentary and human levels, because we lost a member and this is causing a problem in those areas. Obviously, everyone would like to be re-elected, but that is the situation we are faced with.

There is another issue I would like to talk about, because it is important and my colleague did not mention it earlier. We have a mechanism that works and is fairly flexible. It is a system of representation that provides for reviewing the process and readjusting electoral boundaries every 10 years.

I have been in Parliament for 13 years, but every 10 years a census takes place and the electoral boundaries are readjusted. A commission is formed for each province, a judge is appointed and commissioners tour all the ridings to hear what the people and the members think should happen.

There are criteria to be met with regard to population density and the area of the riding. In my own case, I had a riding known as Laurentides, which I think was one of the largest ridings in Canada. It included about 80 municipalities, and I represented it for 10 years. Major changes had to be made because of population growth in the southern part of my riding. It was therefore divided up.

In some regions, ridings were removed, while in others, like mine—the Laurentians, Laval and Lanaudière—population growth has led to the creation of new ridings, such as Rivière-du-Nord. Rivière-du-Nord, which covers one RCM, covers a lot less territory than Laurentides, but a new riding was created, so there is now a new member for that riding.

When the commissioner visited our region, I had the opportunity to make representations. In fact, anyone who wanted to submit a brief could do so. We had 30 days to meet with the commissioners and provide feedback. I felt it made sense to redraw the boundaries. The riding had so many people that it was difficult to represent given the population density. So we broke it into two ridings, which made it much easier to get the work done. And we got a new member of Parliament for the region.

Obviously, other regions have problems too. Some populations are growing and others are shrinking, which means that in some areas, there are geographically huge ridings. One of our colleagues from the North Shore is dealing with just such a situation. Nevertheless, the criteria for making representations to the commission are fairly flexible. The commission has offices in every province. I would therefore invite my colleague from Sudbury to make representations.

This also enables us to make representations about how to name our ridings. It is important for names to represent the ridings, so we had the right to change the riding names if necessary.

I personally did so. Rivière-du-Nord is the full name of the RCM. The name was quite appropriate especially since Rivière du Nord flows through my entire riding.

Representations may be made to the commission. There is that flexibility. In some regions, important representations have led to significant changes. These representations were made by MPs or by means of submissions.

The redistributions do not always follow the lay of the land. They are made by public servants. I am not saying that they are not doing a good job, but they have to take into account all the ridings. In our ridings, there are a certain ways of looking at things and we know very well that it will not work to put such and such a municipality with another one and that it makes no sense to make certain changes.

So we can make our representations, and then the commission makes a decision. We have an important role to play when commissioners visit our regions, and I think they listen to us. At least, they did in our case. Even among colleagues, we had problems. Some of our colleagues wanted to keep some municipalities in their ridings, but in the end, we reached an agreement.

I think the member for Sudbury is having the same problems we had in Quebec, because we, too, lost ridings. She will have an opportunity to make representations in a few years the next time the commission convenes. I am sure she, too, will see major changes in her riding. There is bound to be growth and decline. In my riding, the population grew so fast that decisions had to be made.

I would therefore invite my colleague to make representations to the commission, which will convene during the next census, rather than try to change electoral boundaries here with this bill.

I should add that this would be unfair to the other provinces and Quebec because we would be solving problems in Ontario, but not in other provinces, such as Quebec and, I imagine, British Columbia and Alberta.

The process has to be fair for everyone, and I am not seeing that in this bill. My colleague had a good idea, but she knows perfectly well that our system is already pretty flexible, and that we have the right to make important representations to bring about necessary changes during electoral boundary redistributions.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to this bill because the issue of boundaries has had a profound impact on the region of northern Ontario.

My own riding was taken out in the last redistribution. Arbitrary lines were drawn on the map which divided up rural regions that had long been a homogenous whole and a patchwork of ridings were created instead. This was done with no input from the people in the north. I am very aware of the sense of disenfranchisement that exists among people in the north.

What disturbs me when we discuss this issue is to hear members of other parties stand up and say all votes should be equal and everything should be fair. The reality is that all votes are not equal and have never been equal. In ridings in northern Ontario the average population is about 85,000 to 90,000 people. The average population of a riding in Saskatchewan is 69,000 people. We need to apply the same standard to northern Ontario as that applied to Saskatchewan. Let us apply that to Yukon where there are 35,000 people per seat. Why is it that Prince Edward Island has four seats? Is that 25,000 people per seat? These were guaranteed seats and I do not object to that. My colleague from the Bloc is of course opposing this bill as I expected she would. I am surprised in some ways because Quebec has also been guaranteed a certain number of seats.

The problem in Ontario is the major dislocation between the needs of the rural north and the needs of the urban north. One of the fundamental principles of democracy is the availability of a member of Parliament to his or her constituents. I lived in Toronto for awhile. I could walk 15 minutes one way to an MP's office and 15 minutes the other way to another MP's office. The riding of Timmins--James Bay is larger than the United Kingdom. I have gone into parts of my riding that no other member of Parliament has gone into before.

Talking about disenfranchisement, we just need to look at the James Bay coast where upward of 30% of the population does not have birth certificates. They do not have SIN numbers. They are not even on the map. They live in terrible conditions. I am talking about places like Kashechewan, Attawapiskat and Fort Albany. Health Canada has never provided proper health services to these communities. It just has a MASH unit available.

If a child gets sick and has to be flown out and that child does not have a birth certificate, the cost is charged to the regional health authority. The regional health authority in James Bay is swimming in debt because the federal government will not accept the fact that so many people who live on that land even exist. A major deficit has occurred in terms of health and education dollars.

Some may ask why these people do not have birth certificates and other documentation. The federal and provincial governments have written these people off. Their officials never go there. Our office is there all the time. We are the ones filling out the birth certificates and the other forms. A member said we should get a little more organized and do what is done in southern Ontario. We run five offices out of our region and our staff are on the road all the time.

This is not just about constituency service. This is about political service as well. I sit in the House and listen to members talking about how unfair it is that Saskatchewan does not get to keep 100% of its non-renewable resources. I hear about the need for Newfoundland to maintain rights to its non-renewable resources. Northern Ontario is entirely dependent on non-renewable resources and none of that money has ever gone back to the region.

Kirkland Lake is a struggling gold mine community. In the 1930s right up until the 1960s, Kirkland Lake was keeping the economy of Ontario alive. None of that money went back to the community. Across the border in Rouyn-Noranda and Val-d'Or there are communities that created one-quarter of the wealth that northern Ontario created and they have proper cities with proper infrastructure.

There have been years of neglect in the resource-based communities of northern Ontario. We need to ensure that a fair system is in place similar to southern Ontario. We need to ensure that when these other communities expand and prosper that their prosperity is not at the expense of communities in northern Ontario that are stretched out over a vast area. These communities face major infrastructure problems, major economic problems, and have massive youth out-migration.

We need to maintain a strong political voice for those people. It is only fair. That is what we have in other parts of Canada. We are not asking to go down to 68,000 or 69,000 population size type seats that we see in Nova Scotia. No, we will live with our 85,000 plus that we have in northern Ontario.

The city of Sudbury, which has a bigger population base than Prince Edward Island, has the same amount of political representation as P.E.I. We recognize that we will do without, but I find it absolutely astounding that members from southern Ontario stand in the House and say that by allowing the people of northern Ontario to have the same fair voice as rural regions and the rest of the country, it is somehow disenfranchising 905 and is somehow ripping off people in Markham by preventing them from having their elected representative in the House. It just does not make sense.

It does not make sense when there is a need to have voices articulating the issues of rural based people, people living in forest and mining economies who understand the issues of northern Ontario. We have a right to be heard in the House the same way that people in Yukon, Prince Edward Island and Quebec have a right to representation, and the same way the rural regions and the rest of the country are given that clear exemption.

We are not asking to go down to their levels of 69,000, 35,000 or 25,000 persons per constituency. We are willing to accept what we have, but we are saying if southern Ontario continues to grow at an unchecked rate, it should not be coming on the backs of communities like Red Rock, Iroquois Falls, Sudbury and Timmins.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-290. I had an opportunity to review the argument given during the first hour of debate. I have listened today to the representations of the other three parties. I am not sure whether there is a consensus in the House as to what the intent of the bill is, what the basic principle is.

I think the bill calls out and says that as our population redistributes province by province, every region in the country, and that the per cent of population in our remote regions continues to remain flat or go down, whereas we have a higher concentration in urban centres. This means that not only the geographic size of a particular constituency or riding continues to grow, but there are consequences to the quality of representation that the people who live within the constituency can get as it continues to grow.

There are ridings in Canada that take five hours to fly across. There are constituencies that have 25 or 30 different communities of distinct interest. There are constituencies that have never seen a member of Parliament.

Canada is a very diverse country. In fact, some people out there do not think they are even Canadians any more. No one is talking about their issues. Rural and remote regions of Canada, ostensibly represent the resource industry.

When we think of rural versus urban issues, they are becoming more and more of concern to Canadians. Rural and resource areas, the remote regions of Canada, are getting less attention on the agenda of Parliament, less attention in the laws of Canada and less attention in the investment in their infrastructure and in the services. I think in northern Ontario there is only one passport office. Someone may have to travel a hundred kilometres to the nearest spot to get a passport.

When we think about the growing size of the geography of a riding, where there is a dispersion of population, all Canadians equal to representation and access are not getting it. In fact, the accessibility to services is not there, whether it be health care, social services, education or other needs that all Canadians wish to share with each other. They are not equally accessible.

When those services are not readily available through infrastructure that the Government of Canada has put in all of these communities, people use the member of Parliament as the only person who can help them with their issues, which normally would go through a Government of Canada office. It means the member of Parliament in a rural or remote area of Canada is doing the job that urban members of Parliament, such as myself, take for granted and are done by these other agencies that are available.

Communities in our country are still on party lines. They do not have dedicated phone lines. They do not have access to Internet. They do not have cell networks. Most of our work in urban Canada utilizes those new technologies. Those are not available. Are those people who live in these areas, and not only northern Ontario, but any rural or remote area of Canada, not entitled to the same accessibility for services to which Canadians in urban centres are entitled? How do we get the equity here?

I understand the representations that have been made about representation by population. Because of the constitutional guarantees for provinces, and I will not mention a province because I do not want to pit province against province. nine out of ten provinces are guaranteed a minimum number of seats. Only Ontario does not have a minimum number of seats for representation in Parliament.

In fact, the province of Ontario in 2005 passed legislation to guarantee, I believe, 11 seats for northern Ontario. It has legislation in place because it recognizes the importance of having a voice at the table, not necessarily proportionate to the number of people in that region, representing the interests of that region.

Representation by population is an important aspect. It is not, however, the current situation in Canada. It is not, in fact, reflective of the current democracy in Canada.

I appeal to the government and I appeal to the Bloc Québécois as well to let us look at this bill, not solely from the perspective of northern Ontario but from the perspective of representative democracy, both at election time and in terms of the accessibility of the services that all Canadians should enjoy.

I think we should consider that the principle of this bill is not that it is a northern Ontario bill. It is a Canada bill. It is a Canada bill on behalf of every rural and remote area of Canada, to make sure that as we move down the line, as we get this distribution of population into urban and suburban centres and the percentage of population in rural and remote areas continues to go down, the issues and the contributions that population makes are not diminished in some way simply because there are not that many people.

As a matter of fact, as the technology changes, the numbers of people in agriculture and in natural resource development and delivery are going to go down because we are going to be able to do it more efficiently and meet our needs with less people. Towns are going to disappear.

I do not know how long that is going to take, but we need to keep Canadians connected. The only way to keep Canadians connected is basically through the services that are provided. If, because of population, those services are not being provided by the Government of Canada through offices within reasonable areas, that representation can only be provided by a member of Parliament. That is why we need to have some careful consideration of whether or not the representation of people of Canada in rural and remote areas is equitable. Their voices have to be heard.

I believe that this bill gives us an opportunity to discuss it. I do not think it matters whether the bill passes in terms of becoming legislation in Canada. What does matter, however, is that the points that have been made are important points that should be taken to committee, so that the committee can determine whether or not we are facing a problem or whether there are some remedial steps that can be taken to make absolutely sure that the true representation of all Canadians is respected.

[Diane Marleau, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I must say that I have listened carefully. The argument of representation by population is one that I have heard many times, but the reality is that we do not have absolute representation by population now. The quotient is determined by the number of ridings and the population in the province. Ontario's quotient is 107,000 and something. The average quotient for all other provinces is about 60,000. What I am saying is that there is no absolute representation by population.

At what point do we allow the regions of the country to deteriorate in such a manner so that they have no voice? I am asking that members send this bill to committee so we can have a discussion about how we treat not only northern Ontario, but all the others.

Quebec also has a challenge to tackle. The northern part of Quebec is also facing problems. I think these are similar to the problems faced by Ontario.

To what extent should the importance of our francophone communities in Northern Ontario and our cultural communities be diminished? If there is no need for 10 ridings in the north, let us talk about it. Following the last redistribution, a committee recommended that a study be conducted. So, let us conduct a study before cutting ridings in northern Ontario, or let us at least talk about it. It does not take anything away from anyone.

I am asking for the hon. members' support so that the bill can be referred to committee. We could have a good discussion and perhaps recognize the great challenges faced by some regions of this country.

I ask members to send the bill to committee. Let us have an honest, open discussion about the challenges faced by rural and remote communities, not only in Ontario, because the problem is also in Quebec and in B.C., and it may well be in Alberta as well. I am not as familiar with those provinces as I am with Ontario.

I will tell members now that we must make a decision at one point about what is fair. I think this is the time to have that discussion. I ask members to please support this piece of legislation.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Royal Galipeau]

The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

No.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Royal Galipeau]

All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.

[Some hon. members]

Yea.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Royal Galipeau]

All those opposed will please say nay.

[Some hon. members]

Nay.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Royal Galipeau]

In my opinion the nays have it.

And five or more members having risen:

Pursuant to Standing Order 93 the division stands deferred until Wednesday, November 22 immediately before the time provided for private members' business.

It being 1:25 p.m., the House stands adjourned until Monday, November 20, at 11 a.m., pursuant to Standing Orders 28(2) and 24(1).

(The House adjourned at 1:26 p.m.)