Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be able to say a few words today on procedure and House affairs committee report and the government's request for concurrence in that report dealing with a study of the electoral boundaries readjustment system.
I have a number of things that I want to say about the report and about the process. I also want to say in advance of those comments that I find it interesting that the government members in particular are so anxious to debate this issue at a time when unemployment is running rampant in our country, when globalization is threatening to take away the economic sovereignty of governments and when poverty is creating illness and lack of education in our country.
There are many issues, including those of international governance, that this House should be applying the majority of its time to, to ensure that the people of this country are able to secure employment, to build a quality of life, to educate themselves and their children, to relieve the nation of poverty and the stress of poverty and unemployment which creates, to a certain extent, crime in our streets and insecurity among many in our society.
The issue before us has some importance in and of itself, but if I were sitting on the other side of the House today I would be ensuring that the priority for debate was on those issues that directly affected the quality of life of the people of our country.
However, the bill is before us and as a result of that we certainly cannot ignore the opportunity to address the issues in front of us. In response to that I want to say that I sense a bit of a dilemma facing me as a member of this House because on the one hand I agree with those in this Chamber who today have argued in opposition to concurrence on this motion because I believe that the process that the government has undertaken here significantly disturbs a process that was working in this country and a process that could have been changed not by disrupting it but in addition to that existing process.
I also find myself in agreement with a number of the provisions of the committee's report; a number of provisions which I think will improve the adjustment process in the future. Let me take that in a bit of order and indicate that my preference today as I rise to speak and as I realize I will be called upon to vote shortly is to withhold concurrence on the committee report simply on the basis that the government's interruption of the process was uncalled for and seems to be, in the words of a member who spoke previously, the result of a panic that occurred as a result of Liberal members seeing the results of a boundary redistribution that they were unhappy with.
Granted I have a number of reasons to be concerned about the new boundaries that were created in my own province. Perhaps I will address that briefly before I sit down today.
However, I do not believe that arguments made in reaction to a map that was drawn or arbitrary lines that were drawn on a map is any reason to shut down the process and ignore the work and the regulations that had been established previously.
A number of things have been said today as well. I have listened to the debate reasonably carefully. I recognize a number of things have been said about the numbers of seats in the House of Commons. While that is not a part of this report, I do believe it is worth commenting on.
The mandate of the committee did include a responsibility to have a look at the possibility of restricting the numbers of seats and perhaps even reducing the number of seats in this place. I understand from the comments of the committee chairperson and from reading the report that the committee, not in its entirety but the majority, believes it was not feasible to discuss the cap at this time.
I come from the province of Saskatchewan and so I believe it is sometimes necessary to reduce the numbers of people who represent the population. However, since we are sitting in the federal House and there are more practical matters at work than simply the capping of the number of seats, we owe it to ourselves to look even beyond that particular issue.
When I mentioned coming from Saskatchewan I said that because I am very proud of the Saskatchewan government, the New Democratic Party government, which after it became elected set in motion a process which did reduce the number of seats in the Saskatchewan legislature. A colleague of mine from Saskatchewan earlier today alluded to the fact that Saskatchewan had done this.
The people of Saskatchewan have reacted positively to the move to reduce the number of seats in the provincial legislature. I have found in my own travel through my own constituency and elsewhere throughout Saskatchewan that it is not the numbers the people are concerned about, it is the representation. Listening and responding to the needs of the people are major concerns.
Certainly some have raised the issue of cost. In my own estimation the cost of running government is actually small compared with the cost of providing services and delivering on decisions that governments make. As a result, if we are able to listen and respond well the people of our province and of Canada will respond positively to a government or a political party that is prepared to do that.
In Saskatchewan the people and the government felt that a reduction in the number of seats was possible. They have embraced that concept. I believe, contrary to arguments made by the government side today, the people of Saskatchewan would also understand that if the number of seats in this Chamber were restricted in the future, our province would have a smaller number of members of Parliament and fewer individuals to represent their views in Ottawa.
I said earlier this has to be taken into a broader context. Representation by population in this country does mean that some regions, some provinces, some territories will receive less attention as a result of the number of people who can vote on issues. Therefore it is necessary for the whole concept of reform or the rebuilding of Parliament, not just the House of Commons, to be done as a unit at the same time.
If the House of Commons is to be reformed, if it is to be rebuilt under representation by population, I say without condition that I want to see that done in conjunction with and parallel to the reform or the rebuilding of the second chamber of Parliament. An elected and accountable Senate that would represent the regional or territorial interests of the country must occur at exactly the same as a redistribution of seats in Parliament.
While I believe the Chamber can debate and should be looking at the possibility of reducing its number of seats, in the future the committee must also take into account that it cannot be done in isolation. It cannot be done on its own, or the people of Saskatchewan and other provinces that may lose seats as a result of redistribution would have a grievance against a government which is not listening to the long term grievances of western Canadians about the lack of concern of the House of Commons wherein the majority of members voting on bills come from the more populated parts of the country.
A number of things I want to discuss in relation to the report have some positive aspects to them and are in direct relation to my feelings about how the redistribution process should occur. When speaking to the bill earlier today in his opening remarks the chairperson of the committee, the member for Kingston and the Islands, said that there were a number of problems with the system the committee was trying to correct.
He spoke about the proposed maps that come with no forewarning or opportunity for input from the public. He talked about commissions currently not being required to justify the rationale for their decisions. He talked about the lack of standard application of rationale across the country, that we had different decisions made by different commissions in different provinces across the country and therefore a patchwork of reasons for commission maps being produced in different parts of the country.
He talked about commissions making seemingly unnecessary changes to boundary maps when there were very few reasons for change. He talked about the size of the House and the growth of the numbers of seats. These were problems the committee wanted to address.
In this regard I want to talk about the beginning of the process. The chairperson of the committee was absolutely correct when he said that the public first comes upon the report of the commission when most of its work has been done. The public sees a single map, a redistribution based upon the commissioner's feelings about how that map should be drawn.
The proposed map is put before the electorate as a fait accomplis. It takes a considerable amount of work on behalf of the public, often in conjunction with members of Parliament, to come up with a good rationale for changing the maps presented by the commissions.
The committee has done a fine job of responding by calling for an initial public notice of the beginning of the process and a twofold requirement that the commissions produce three maps with justifications for their decisions in each case. This will go a
long way to correcting one of the serious problems that affects the process as it exists today.
In Saskatchewan, The Battlefords-Meadow Lake constituency that I currently represent virtually disappears under the new map drawn by the commissioners in our province. If I agreed with the initial premise or the rationale of the commissioners, I would have no difficulty with the disappearance of my constituency. There would be an obvious determination on my part as to whether or not I would seek renomination and re-election in another constituency.
However, it is impossible to disagree under the current set of circumstances with the commissioners' original rationale for starting where they started to draw their maps. In Saskatchewan's case the commissioners decided, given that there were no new seats to be allocated, they would redraw the Saskatchewan map by giving the two urban centres, Saskatoon and Regina, an extra seat. Each of them currently have three seats. That meant that each of those major centres in Saskatchewan would be given, the commissioners argued, a fourth seat. Saskatoon and Regina would each have an urban and a rural part. All rural seats surrounding Regina and Saskatoon had to be pushed out a bit, pushed north and south a bit, and two of them squeezed out entirely. As a result The Battlefords-Meadow Lake and the constituency of Mackenzie virtually disappeared.
In order to argue the boundaries we have to argue the entire map of the province of Saskatchewan and the original rationale of the commissioners. If we have the opportunity to discuss that in advance we may feel that we have a lot more opportunity in the process. In fact we might indeed have a lot more input into the process.
While the current map exists and people in Saskatchewan are generally expecting the constituency boundaries to change, I want to stress the recommendations contained in the report in front of us. Perhaps someone can correct me if I am wrong, but if by June a new bill has not been passed the boundaries established by the current commission would stand. However, if the new bill were to pass by June, new commissions would perhaps be established based on the new rules set out in front of us. Therefore I believe the people of Saskatchewan will have to wait until the end of June to know whether there will be new boundaries for federal ridings within our province.
I do not believe the changes in the bill justify the suspension of the current process. I am quite prepared to work with the new boundaries that exist in our province.
I want to make a further comment before sitting down. I commend the Saskatchewan Boundaries Commission that currently sits on one count. It has created a northern seat that is separate and apart from an urban centre. I have criticized the commission and will criticize it in concluding my remarks today by indicating that it created that northern seat by pushing the boundaries surrounding the city of Prince Albert farther south. It had to do that using the available quotient to remove the urban centre of Prince Albert from that seat.
That created a northern seat with a fairly large agricultural and rural municipality component to it that has absolutely nothing in common with northern villages, the Metis and aboriginal communities in the north.
I applaud some of the changes made by the committee. I deplore the process the government has used here. I certainly look forward to what will occur over the next few months as the process continues.
