Madam Speaker, I recognize that there are some ridings that are much bigger than my own. My colleague's riding of Battle River—Crowfoot is a huge one.
I do not want to be misinterpreted. I am not saying that MPs in big cities work any less. All I am saying is that their work is very different. In ridings like ours, a single meeting can take four hours, so we can talk with a single constituent. That representation is very different for someone in a big city where everything is about an hour from the constituency office. That is a big difference.
This is what the provincial commissions will have to consider when they propose new electoral boundaries. We must use this latitude to make it easier for constituents in rural ridings to access their MP, and I think the existing commissions have that flexibility. The act does not need to be changed; we simply need to make use of the freedom and latitude it already offers.