moved that C-290, An Act to amend the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act (Northern Ontario), be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Mr. Speaker, this private member's bill comes as a result of some of the problems that we have experienced in northern Ontario.
I will tell the House right away that it deals with northern Ontario. I know though that the problem exists in other parts of the country. I would advise my hon. colleagues that if they wish they could also bring forward the same kind of bill to deal with the same challenges. However, I know northern Ontario well. Therefore, I thought I would start with that particular section.
In the last 10 years northern Ontario has lost two ridings which is a lot when we consider that northern Ontario goes all the way down to the Muskokas and is a very defined area. There is both provincial and federal programming to address the particular issues of northern Ontario, but when we consider that particular part of the province covers 90% of the land mass of Ontario, members will understand the difficulties that we face in servicing that kind of a land mass with only 10 MPs.
My bill purports that we would amend the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act to ensure that northern Ontario maintains a minimum of 10 ridings. This would allow us to continue with a fair representation for northern Ontario.
Northern Ontario, which has many francophone communities, was greatly affected by the last redistribution of federal electoral boundaries, which reduced the number of ridings from 11 to 10. Four or five years prior to that, the number of ridings had been reduced from 12 to 11. This is beginning to pose a major challenge.
It represents a loss of political power that is not negligible and that is attributable to the declining population in the northern part of the province. However, that is only one aspect of the problem; the other is that there has been a very significant increase in the population of the large province of Ontario, particularly in the south.
As the size of rural ridings increase, the task for even the most conscientious and hard working representatives, MPs, of staying in touch with the needs, desires and aspirations of their far flung constituents becomes extremely difficult. The people of any rural or regional area associate themselves with a particular city or town and it is often where they go for different services, where they get the newspapers, and watch the news coverage. This is especially true of the francophone community.
Ms. Dyane Adam, Official Languages Commissioner, said, and I quote:
To summarize, official language communities should not have their vitality weakened by the decisions of federal institutions that are required to comply with the government’s commitment to support their development and enhance their vitality under Part VII of the Official Languages Act. The commissions, by failing to give due regard to the networks of relationships that exist in official language communities as a result of their ongoing efforts, are contributing in varying degrees to weakening official language communities and marginalizing them from both the economic and social standpoints.
The Official Languages Commissioner recommended that government make certain improvements to the Electoral Boundaries Act to ensure that the electoral boundaries commissions honour the commitment to enhance the vitality of official language communities and support their development.
In 1980, as a result of boundary readjustment, one of the only ridings with a francophone majority, Cochrane North, was adjusted to include a large part of Northern Ontario. The result was that the francophones in the new riding of Cochrane—Superior were lost in the anglophone majority of the northeast portion of the riding. We should point out that the riding has been redefined since then. This is only one of the examples. It is imperative that we ensure these communities have representation that gives them a voice.
The increase in Canada's population in the past 10 years has necessitated a change to the total number of electoral districts and the House of Commons in the last one has gone from 301 seats to 308 seats. The number of electoral districts in the House of Commons is derived from a formula and rules that are set out in sections 51 and 51A of the Constitution Act, 1867. The formula takes into account changes to provincial populations as reflected in the decennial census.
Between the census of 1991 and 2001, the population of Ontario increased from 10,084,885 to 11, 410,046. The number of electoral districts in Ontario was increased from 103 to 106.
When readjusting electoral boundaries, a commission is required to apply the principles contained in the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act. The act directs the commission to ensure that each electoral district in the province shall, as close as reasonably possible, correspond to the electoral quotient for the province. Therefore, the electoral quotient for districts in Ontario is a population of 107,742, which is established by dividing the population of Ontario by the number of electoral districts assigned to the province.
However, the commission may depart from the quotient where necessary or desirable to, first, respect the community of interest or community of identity in the province or the historical pattern of an electoral district in the province, or ensure a manageable geographic size for electoral districts in sparsely populated rural or northern regions of the province.
The fact that northern Ontario's 10 ridings account for 90% of the province's geographic area, as I stated earlier, it is very difficult for some of the MPs. I am not speaking here for myself because I represent a largely urban area but I thought it best, as one who is not as affected by this as some of my colleagues, to take their case in hand and to speak as a whole for all of northern Ontario.
Some of my colleagues cannot get to their ridings without chartering a plane, a helicopter or waiting for the ice roads to come in so they can get to it. There are many ridings in northern Ontario where driving 10 hours to get to just one part of the riding is nothing. Northern Ontario, in many places, does not have cell phone service nor high speed Internet and they do not have a lot of the transportation infrastructure that would be needed. It, therefore, is very difficult to represent these groups of people.
Northern Ontario has many aboriginal communities, francophone communities and communities of all sorts that are vastly different one from the other. There are huge mining communities, softwood lumber communities, agricultural communities and communities that rely a fair bit on tourism.
How can we get the attention of government when one's voice keeps being weakened all the time? Our newspapers are not what they used to be. Our television coverage is not what it used to be. We tend to get basically the news from Toronto and Ottawa, which removes some of the clout that we might have.
I will give members a recent example. I was watching a television program one morning and it was showing beautiful pictures of a huge forest fire in California. While I was watching the program, I knew a massive forest fire was going on in northwestern Ontario that was so bad that no one was even trying to do anything but to get the people out. I did not hear on word mentioned of that. The station knew about the fire in California because it could get the feed from there. Did anybody ever know about the fire in northwestern Ontario? We only found out about it when the smoke from that fire ended up in New Brunswick. Somebody finally woke up and realized that a fire was burning in northwestern Ontario. It is important for people in the regions to have some kind of a voice, which is where the MP comes in.
As well, the regions have seen a decline in the services offered by the federal government. There are very few offices in the regions across the country. If someone in Timmins, for example, needs an urgent passport they must drive to Toronto or Ottawa, which is a 10 hour drive. People tell us that we should develop our tourism. Recently we were able to convince some airlines to fly people directly from our Sudbury airport to sun vacation spots. However, we were told that if they needed an emergency passport that they should stop by the closest office to the Sudbury airport. There is no passport office close to the Sudbury airport. The nearest ones are in Toronto and Ottawa.
All of those things make it very difficult for the people of northern Ontario. We supply a lot of the wealth that is generated in this country. We just have to look at the mining companies as an example. Northern Ontario faces challenges every day.
I ask the House to consider what we are asking, which is that we allow Ontario to give us a minimum of 10 ridings. They can be redistributed among the 10, which is fine. A number of provinces already have that guarantee so it is not an unusual request. Some of these provinces have smaller populations than northern Ontario and a smaller land mass. Our challenge in northern Ontario is that we belong to Ontario. We do not want to separate from Ontario but we think it might be a nice idea that we be given a bit of consideration so that we too can have a strong voice, a strong presence and be able represent our people well.
