Madam Speaker, I really must contest what the member is claiming: that the Liberal Party plan, whose numbers are available to everybody, pits region against region.
There is a principle here. If a province has a certain percentage of the population, it gets a certain percentage of the seats. If we follow that principle, we do not pit regions against each other.
I would like to ask the member whether he is being realistic, to use his own words. If every region, obeying the constraints about the number of senators, had the same proportion of seats as the proportion of the population, the regions would not be pitted against each other.