Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley has given the House an eloquent representation of why this bill simply does not address some of the very serious problems with the Senate.
There are two arguments that have been made in the House. One is that this is incremental reform and it is trying to move the Senate in a direction that makes it more accountable to the Canadian public. The second is that it will increase regional representation.
Those of us from British Columbia know how desperately more adequate regional representation is needed. Recently a community trust bill was put forward in regard to the $1 billion going to forestry and manufacturing and we saw how the voices in British Columbia simply were not adequately represented when that bill was developed. British Columbia's forestry industry is a significant part of its GDP, yet because that bill is allocated on a per capita basis, it is not going to deal with some of the serious forestry impacts in British Columbia.
Given the fact that this argument around regional representation simply does not wash in this bill, given the fact that what an elected Senate would do is contribute to more costs to the taxpayer in terms of running elections, given the fact that this was an opportunity for meaningful democratic reform--and perhaps we should have been looking at proportional representation--I want to ask the member what he thinks about the regional representation aspect of this legislation.