Mr. Speaker, we are talking about fundamental democracy; folks being sent to this place to represent their ridings.
I thank the minister for his attempt, although I disagree with the title of the bill, the fair representation act. I would call it almost fair. I am not sure anyone could actually ever get it to be fair. There will always be some province saying it is not fair. Examples abound across this great country of ours demonstrating that this is a difficult place to represent. My friend from what he likes to call NWT--which is really the riding of Western Arctic, but he does not think it is the western Arctic--has the challenge of representing few people in a great geographical territory. The challenges of that are self-evident.
How do we get to some compilation of what the government now calls fair representation, and I would call it almost fair representation? Clearly, it is about how we determine representation. It should be, in a sense, fluctuating all the time since the demographics of the country fluctuate. However, one fundamental should not be lost. With great apologies to first nations folks, we adopted the Westminster model, built upon the sense of two nations.
My friend talked earlier about Upper and Lower Canada, and about how those two pieces came to build what we consider to be Canada. When one looks at that, how does one get a sense of what fair representation should look like? How does one respect the fact that these two pieces, within the model we know as this House, are representative of the places that founded this particular country that we call home?
How do we do that? How do we satisfy those needs? They are legitimate. In 2006 the House said that Quebec is a nation in a united Canada, driven by the current Prime Minister, to his credit. I congratulate the Prime Minister for doing so. I think it is a good thing.
As my colleague, the member for Hamilton Centre, said this morning, we can look back to the previous Conservative prime minister. He thought Quebec should have 25% of the House seats. We had a debate and an accord around that and acceptance around that. However, at the end of the day it fell apart when we saw resistance, not to the 25% but to other aspects that people did not like. It eventually unravelled. Otherwise, we would not be debating whether it should be 24.35%, as we have suggested; it would be 25%, and that accord would be amended.
I have not heard from this side that they wish to go back and look at the Constitution. I am not so sure there are a lot of folks in the House who really would want to go back, look at the Constitution and say they want to change this part or that part, knowing the difficulties in this country.