Madam Speaker, I am pleased to be entering the debate on this subject. I am glad the the minister covered basically how redistribution works. That way, I do not have to explain how it functions to residents back in Alberta.
One difference of opinion that I have with the minister is that he said this was a substantive piece of legislation. Actually, I would say that it is not a significant piece of legislation, and that is why I like it. It is actually one of the smallest changes that could possibly be made to the redistribution formula and it preserves the entirety of the Fair Representation Act, basically the principles and the substance of what Stephen Harper passed in 2011. That is why I like it: It is such a small change.
The grandfathering clause of 1985 basically ensured that provinces would get the same number of seats that they had before 1985. They could not fall below that number, and this is an update to the 43rd Parliament, so I see no great change in this. The effect is basically what I call the banking of the seats so that no province in the future, should conditions change, would lose extra seats in a future redistribution.
I looked back at 1988. The three fastest-growing provinces were British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. British Columbia had 32 seats; Alberta had 26 seats; Ontario had 99 seats. In the 2019 election, there were 42 seats for British Columbia, 34 seats for Alberta and 121 seats for Ontario. When I looked that up, I saw that it was a 10-seat gain as a floor for British Columbia, an eight-seat gain as a floor for Alberta, and a 22-seat gain for Ontario. We have to admit that Ontario remains heavily under-represented, even with this change to our legislation. It is about 40% of the population. It is a huge province in our Confederation. There is no doubt about that. Ontario was the largest province at the time of Confederation as well, and it continues that history to this day.
There are a couple of points I also want to make on past Supreme Court cases. This often comes up when there is a lot of confusion with the American political culture of one person, one vote. That is not the direct principle that is applied in Canada. In a Saskatchewan electoral boundaries case from 1991, the Supreme Court found in a section 3 charter case that in this country the principle is effective representation, and that looks toward smaller ridings. Ridings are also very expansive in terms of territory. While spatial limits are not directly in the legislation, there is that idea of effective representation.
As the minister said, how we represent our constituents is difficult, and there is a tension between two ideas here. There are those of us who are in very large ridings. I have the second-largest riding in Canada by population size and my colleague from Edmonton—Wetaskiwin has over 200,000 people in his riding, so members can imagine the volume of emails, phone calls and meetings we would have to have in order to meet with all of our constituents so that they believe they are being well represented.
On the other side is spatial representation. Many members of Parliament have very large ridings. I am thinking of northern Saskatchewan, the territories and a riding like Labrador. Labrador is a difficult riding to represent in good weather, and I cannot imagine how difficult it is to represent constituents in bad weather when one cannot travel the long distances and has to stay overnight in very remote communities. There is a tension inherent in that type of representation, so I want to recognize that. In this redistribution, we try to aim for effective representation. This small change to the formula would achieve that. There was also the case of Figueroa v. Canada in 2003 that equally looked at that issue.
I want to admit another thing here. I love Yiddish proverbs, as members know, and to a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish. This is truly something that very few Canadians will pay close attention to. I see the parliamentary secretary to the House leader chuckling at that. This is horseradish. Truthfully, “inside baseball” would be a more common saying, but I love the Yiddish version of it much more and I love horseradish too. I recognize that a lot of Canadians will struggle in recognizing why we are having this prolonged debate on redistribution, so I want to make the point here, because I do believe it is important.
We do these redistributions every 10 years, essentially, and we have been doing them basically since our country was founded in 1867. When I went back through all the Parliaments in the past, I saw that in two Parliaments there was a reduction in the number of seats between one election to the next, in three Parliaments there were an equal number of changes and in 20 Parliaments there was an increase in the number of seats. I want to note some of them.
The first Parliament in which there was a reduction of seats was the Parliament in 1892. In 1892, the redistribution actually reduced seats for three different provinces. That reduction happened to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. The three Parliaments in which there would be an equal number of seats at the next election were 1903, 1933 and 1999.
Parliament has been growing as well. We are sitting in a new chamber as the Centre Block is being renovated, being taken apart and updated for the 21st century in order for us to keep doing our work on behalf of constituents. We have grown a lot.
We had 181 seats at the start of Confederation in 1867, and our parliament has grown to 338 members. With this change to the law, we were set to go to 342 members, but we will actually be going to 343 members if this legislation passes and receives the Governor General's assent. The last major changes I saw were in 1966, when the Parliament went down one seat and there were significant changes all around. In that redistribution, Quebec lost a seat, Nova Scotia lost a seat, Manitoba lost a seat and Saskatchewan actually lost four seats.
That was the last redistribution I could find in which there was a loss of seats to the provinces until 1999. In 1999 there was a seat lost for the Northwest Territories, but that is because it was being split. That does not really count as a loss, because we just split the territory in two and afforded effective representation for Nunavut. I think that is entirely fair. I have never heard anybody complain about that, as they needed their own member of Parliament to represent them properly in this Parliament.
I wanted to bring that here because I wanted to make sure that people understand that this House has continued to grow as our population has grown. We compare ourselves to other chambers all across the world, but I do not think that is an effective comparison. I also do not believe that it is a fair comparison. Often we are compared to the Americans and to the mother Parliament in the United Kingdom. Those are unfair comparisons that we make. This is Canada, and we make the determination of how many seats are needed and how many members of Parliament are needed for us to do our work effectively on behalf of our constituents.
I also want to say that I am a regular reader of The Hub, which is an Ontario-based political dialogue podcast. It also sends out a morning jolt. There was an article this morning by Mark Johnson, who is a former Conservative candidate. He spoke of an idea I have heard quite often, which is that we have enough MPs in this House and that we could not possibly fit any more into this House. I was just looking at the chamber layout; we have seven empty seats in here, so if this change passes and we add five new seats, we can accommodate those five members of Parliament without having to change anything here.
I have probably said this before during the Standing Orders debate: I would be more than fine to move toward the benches model that they have in the United Kingdom. Then we would have more than enough seats for all the members of Parliament to do the work they need to do in this House.
Redistribution, every time it is done, draws its critics. I remember that back in 2011, the Stephen Harper government, the government at the time, had to propose legislation twice before it was able to pass it eventually at the very end of 2011. It was then called the Fair Representation Act. In the current legislation, I see the formula remaining the same and preserving the legacy of Stephen Harper. I know the Liberal government will find itself in the difficult position of preserving the legacy of Stephen Harper in this legislation, as it should.
Density will always keep growing in urban areas. That is a fact of life. That is a reality that Canada and other industrialized nations have experienced for well over 100 years now. There will always be a tension between cities that are growing and need more representation as they grow in population size, versus the regions where increasingly large rural ridings are becoming more and more difficult for members of Parliament to represent because of highway connections and the increasing number of mayors and city councillors and local events members need to go to There are Legion halls to attend and local housing affordability task forces that are created.
These are all the difficulties between urban representation versus rural representation. One is not better than the other; there are just different tensions and different difficulties that every single member of Parliament needs to meet.
In this redistribution that is posted online on Elections Canada's website, there is a quotient that says that the average that Elections Canada uses in calculating redistribution is 121,891.
As I said before, there are over 170,000 people in my riding, and my riding continues to grow. There are still communities being built, just like in the riding of Calgary Rocky Ridge, which is diagonally opposed to mine on the other side of the city of Calgary. It continues to grow as new suburbs and subdivisions continue to be built. That is the case for a lot of my colleagues. We live in growing communities. There are members for British Columbia and Ontario who experience these exact points.
This takes me to another point I want to make. The member for Mégantic—L'Érable, the deputy leader of the Conservative Party, moved that the House oppose any federal electoral redistribution scenario that would cause Quebec or any other province or territory to lose one or more electoral districts in the future, and that the House call on the government to act accordingly. There was a lone voice in the House that rejected this.
I note that the substance and principle of that idea is inside the Bill C-14 legislation that has been moved. I like to tell constituents back home, as well as my colleagues, that all unanimous consent motions have an impact, whether they are agreed to or not. Some of them make the news and some of them make waves, but they all obviously have an impact. It seems that the minister perhaps took note of that and decided to do it.
I want to talk about the percentages in this redistribution, because Alberta and Albertans would be gaining the most seats of any province in Confederation. We would be gaining three seats in this redistribution, which would take us from 34 seats to 37 seats. This is great news for Alberta. We have been trying to get much closer to representation by population, or as close as we can get to it. In this redistribution, by my count we would have 10.7% of the seats while we have about 11.6% of the population. British Columbia, for example, would have 12.5% of the seats and 13.68% of the population.
We are moving in the right direction. Ten years from now, at the next redistribution debate, the MPs who will be there will have to create a brand new formula to increasingly adjust for the rapidly growing populations in the three fast-growing provinces of Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. Perhaps there will be a new province. Perhaps the great province of Manitoba will start to grow at a pace where we should adjust its representation count then. I hope that happens, and I hope they elect a massive number of Conservative members to the House so we can represent them really well in a strong majority national Conservative government, when we earn the right to govern some day.
I also want to talk about Ontario. By my count, with the redistribution Ontario would have 35.5% of the seats and a population size of about 38.9%. Ontario continues to be under-represented, but it is also the province with the most representation in the House, as it was at the very beginning of Confederation.
I will also note that, if this legislation passes, the province of Quebec would continue to have and enjoy a demographic weight equal or proportional to its size in the House of Commons, with 22.7% of the seats to 22.5% of the population. It has it just about right. In fact, the representation rule, created back in 2011 in the Fair Representation Act, ensures that any province that was about to lose any seats would then be apportioned based on the percentage of its population in Canada.
Canada is a fast-growing country, and that rule was introduced equally to all provinces. It would apply to any province in a redistribution to make sure it always had that percentage representation in Canada.
That is why I like this legislation. There is a lot to like for Albertans. We would be banking our seats. We would be gaining the most seats of any province in Canada, and getting closer to that representation by population that I, as a westerner and especially a prairie Canadian, really like to see, because Alberta is a fast-growing province. We are expected to reach that point of getting over five million people within the next decade. I want to make sure my province is well represented here and that we continue to represent it properly by having enough people.
I think all of us will recognize that, over the past four months, representation has been made much more difficult. It has been much tougher to get back to the thousands of emails and hundreds of phone calls we have been receiving. Everybody wants to hear from their member of Parliament. They do not want to hear from a staff member. They do not want to get a stock email. They want that personal, authentic touch point. They want to hear directly from the person they voted for, or voted against, in order to hear their views and opinions, and to talk to the person who represents them in the people's chamber: in the House of Commons. That is entirely fair.
On October 29, I wrote a Substack. I have a Substack newsletter that I send to about 8,500 people in my riding who subscribe to it. I wrote that, should the Liberal government propose to Parliament any changes to the apportioning of seats, away from the Harper 2011 formula, I would make the case for apportioning seats to representation by population for every province in Confederation.
There is the rep-by-pop idea, which I started speaking about, and the Supreme Court decision rendered in 1991 that talked about effective representation, when we do not have a direct one-person, one-vote system. We believe in effective representation, but we strive for representation by population. The percentage of a province's population in Canada should be closely reflected in the number of seats it gets in the House of Commons. I wanted to keep my promise to my constituents and make sure that I raised that issue in the House on their behalf, as I said I would.
Representation by population would ensure that, by my count, Alberta would get an extra three seats, British Columbia would get another four seats and Ontario would get about an extra 10 seats. This is obviously on top of the current ones that are going to be apportioned to them. That would bring us closer and would update that rule, so that the three fastest-growing provinces would be much closer to representation by population.
That is not in this legislation, but despite that, I wanted to make the point that in the future, when members of Parliament look at redistribution again, in perhaps just under 10 years, they will look back at debates, as I did. I looked back at debates from 2011, and I noticed that a few Liberal MPs, who later became cabinet ministers, noted that perhaps we should get rid of the grandfather clause.
Actually, one MP was a former professor from Montreal: Stéphane Dion mentioned it during those debates in 2011. I read those debates because I think that is where we get the most information from. What were people thinking when they passed that legislation?
Again, in 2011, the Stephen Harper government added 30 seats to the House. It was one of the largest redistribution increases ever made, to bring us on the path to ensuring we had that representation by population. It was getting closer to that ideal that many of us in the west, and in Pacific Canada as well, see as the right way of representing constituencies, recognizing that the Supreme Court in 1991 talked about effective representation.
I wanted to make sure I mentioned that, because I told constituents that I would indeed do that, as well.
The issue of under-representation will continue in this country. That is just a fact of life. In five years, even if we added seats today, people would still be complaining about being under-represented because of population movements. People vote with their feet the most. That is how people decide where they want to live and where they want to raise families, where they want to put down deep roots in a community, and where, eventually, they want to be buried and have their future grandchildren live, work, play and contribute to their local communities. People vote with their feet, at the end of the day. There is an entire realm of activities people do before elections to participate in the civic process.
The last point that I will make on the civic process is that the electoral boundaries commissions are the way in the country that we can get involved in the electoral boundaries process. Anybody can get involved and send in information on what they think boundary redistribution should look like for their area, and whether municipalities should be added or removed. I also bring up this fact because there are only three people on these boundaries commissions who make these decisions. People can remind them of difficulties.
If we draw a boundary where there is no easy highway access, how is a member of Parliament supposed to represent the area if they have to, say, do a two-hour detour in order to get to a community? If we are going to only look at population and we have a riding that is about four streets by 12 blocks, that is also difficult to represent if we are going up and down condo towers all the time. There will be very few community events, but maybe we will have an extremely high population size that will lead to hundreds of emails a week.
Before January, I remember that I was getting about, as I calculated, 65 unique emails a day. There was a point during the Emergencies Act, when the government invoked it, that I was getting about 1,000 emails a day from constituents for almost 10 days. I checked, and they were from constituents in the riding. That is an incredible volume of correspondence that I had to get to. It has changed. Email is much easier than it used to be.
I like this legislation. This is legislation I can vote for. I believe that a government that legislates the least damages the population the least. I am a minimalist when it comes to these things. This is the least bad option I can see the government could have moved forward to. For Albertans, it preserves the three seats of weight-gaining in this redistribution, and this is Stephen Harper's Conservative government legacy.
