Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak about Bill C-14, the preserving provincial representation in the House of Commons act.
The seat allocation and electoral boundaries readjustment process is an important part of our democracy. Its purpose is to ensure that the House of Commons reflects the changing nature of Canada's demographic profile and that all Canadian voices are heard.
I will admit that this bill is a small change. It is a small compromise to an elaborate electoral formula that has a long history of compromise, competing regional interests and vigorous political debate.
We can debate about tinkering with the formula to appease political interests, but at the end of the day, most members of the House would likely agree that baked into the redistribution is systemic unfairness. This exists because the redistribution formulas were created for a country that no longer exists. The current formula was made for a country that did not see people living in the west at the numbers they do today.
At Canada's founding, the fathers of Confederation had a vision for Canada, how it would be a place for freedom-seeking people around the world and how it would be a place of economic development and prosperity, but I do not think the fathers of Confederation could have foreseen the tremendous growth and prosperity of western Canada. As a British Columbian, I am proud of the contributions my province and the people I represent have made to our country.
While Canada has changed and grown, we continue to be bound by rules for electoral redistribution that are and always will be systemically unfair for Canadians living in certain regions of the country, namely Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario.
Let me share an example to highlight this, but first, to preface this, it is important to note that, in 1991, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that representation by population is fundamental to electoral redistribution. My riding of Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon currently has 101,216 people. The average riding size of the four ridings—