Mr. Speaker, my colleague talked about making this place more democratic, so I will assume that his question refers not to the Senate but to the House of Commons. The short answer for the Senate, if he had asked me about that, in a nutshell would have been that if we cannot reform the Senate, I think the move for the abolition of the Senate would grow. Having a unicameral Parliament in a federation is not as good as having a bicameral Parliament, which is why we see them in all the other federations of the world.
With regard to this place, the danger is simply this. Ridings are getting larger and larger as the population of the country is growing, but they are getting larger in the provinces with the most rapidly growing populations, which in practice means Alberta, B.C. and Ontario, where there is a more rapid rate than elsewhere. There is an increasing discontinuity between the size of an average riding in Ontario, for example, and Saskatchewan.
I wrote a article for the National Post three or four years ago in which I pointed out that if current population trends continue, Statistics Canada predicts that 20 years from now the average riding size in Alberta will be twice the size of an average riding in Saskatchewan, for example. There is something fundamentally unfair about a system like that. We are simply trying to do what we can to rectify that situation.