Peter Milliken

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, 1995, March 27th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I always respect the views of the hon. member for Bellechasse which he expressed so well this afternoon. I think the problem is that he chose a subject that is not part of the bill.

Actually, the issue he raised today by proposing this motion in amendment is a constitutional issue, one for a debate on the Constitution like we had during the debate to which he referred in his speech, right up to the vote. Was it on the constitutional question? Or was it on the Charlottetown accord? It was either one or the other.

I remember that evening when I was not in the House to vote on this question. It was a very important question, and I supported the Charlottetown accord.

I supported the accord, and the voters in Kingston and the Islands voted for it, but I am sure the hon. member for Bellechasse did not support the Charlottetown accord. I hope he did, but I am afraid he voted against it. I am sure that Reform Party members in this House voted against Charlottetown, and that is too bad, because it was a good accord and I supported it, as I said before.

The Charlottetown accord died. While some of us worked very hard on the referendum campaign to ensure its success, as I did, it was rejected by the people and we must respect that decision and try to get on with life.

If the hon. member wants to amend the Constitution of Canada to provide some minimum number of seats for another province, that is fine. We already have some of those in the Constitution, with respect to Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick at the moment. We can deal with amendments to the Constitution of Canada. However, I am not going to support efforts to make those changes through the back door by changing the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act.

The hon. member knows this is a back door way of trying to achieve something that requires a front door approach. What he is asking us to do is ensure that another province be added to the list of those guaranteed protection under the act. In my view we have too many of them now. In addition to the two guarantees in favour of a Senate floor in all provinces but that are now full force in effect in respect of both Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, we have the grandfather clause introduced into the Constitution by the previous government.

The grandfather clause ensures that provinces will not drop below the number of seats they had in the House in I think 1979. That clause is protecting several other provinces which in a normal redistribution would lose seats to more populous provinces.

Now we have the spectacle of the Reform Party urging on the House a reduction in the number of seats in the House. It would have abolished the grandfather clause and reduced the number of seats in many provinces. I am afraid we would have said goodbye to the hon. member for Kindersley-Lloydminister because his province would have lost a very large number of seats. I can only imagine that when the electors got a chance to deal with him, having put forward such a proposition, they would have made short work of his political career, which I am sure would be a matter of considerable regret to many of us in the House.

The government rejected this idea and I see it has not come back in amendments today. I can understand why. I suspect that if the members of the Reform Party pushed the reduction in seats in amendments with the dire consequences that we all know would follow for the province of Saskatchewan among others, they would be in difficulty today.

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, 1995, March 27th, 1995]

No, Mr. Speaker. Do I have any time left?

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, 1995, March 27th, 1995]

I want the hon. member for Kindersley-Lloydminster to hear this because he said this is bad.

It stated:

(a) special geographic considerations, including in particular the sparsity or density of the population of various regions of the province, the accessibility of those regions or the size or shape thereof, appear to the commission to render such a departure necessary or desirable, or

(b) any special community or diversity of interests of the inhabitants of various regions of the province appears to the commission to render such a departure necessary or desirable,

In other words, those were the tests that the commissions appointed in 1993, and that rendered their reports late last year, had as their guideline.

I ask you, Mr. Speaker, to compare those words with the words in clause 19(3), which the hon. member for Kindersley-Lloydminster says will render voter equity almost meaningless. In 19(3) it states:

A commission may depart from the application of the rule set out in paragraph 2(a) in circumstances that are viewed by the commission as being extraordinary because a part of a province, the population of which is less than 75 per cent of the electoral quota for the province calculated in the manner described in subparagraph 2(a)(i) or (ii), is geographically isolated from the rest of the province or is not readily accessible from the rest of the province.

In other words, the test is narrowed. It is not widened, it is narrowed. It is harder to get a special riding under the new rules. It must meet one of two tests. The old rule allowed the shape, the density or sparsity of population and all kinds of different things to enter into it. That is no longer a consideration. Accessibility is now the test. There are two tests: geographically isolated from the rest of the province or not readily accessible from the rest of the province.

We have narrowed the test. The hon. member is still complaining that voter equity is rendered almost meaningless by this test. I suggest to him that he should re-read the old act, read the new bill, and he would conclude, as I do, that his amendment is not well-founded. He should leave those words in the new bill and support this change. It is a good change and one that will result in the basic principle for which we are all striving, that is, effective representation.

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, 1995, March 27th, 1995]

No. I want to turn to the words of the act itself because I think this is important. I do not normally like to read statutes in the House because it is pretty tedious.

I would like to quote from the old Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act that dealt with the power of commissions to go beyond the 25 per cent rule. It stated as follows:

The commission may depart from the strict application of the rules set out in paragraph 1(a) and (b) in any case where:

(a) special geographic-

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, 1995, March 27th, 1995]

Now I hear them laughing because they do not like to think of them weeping, but a few months ago it was not quite that way.

The fact is there were two ridings in all the 1994 proposals that were above or below the 25 per cent quotient.

This is not a case of rendering voter equity almost meaningless. For the hon. member for Kindersley-Lloydminster to engage in that kind of rhetoric is not something I would expect of him. I am sure he did not really mean what he said.

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, 1995, March 27th, 1995]

No, he says. Yes, I say to him. He knows perfectly well that many of his members were quite unhappy, almost weepy at the proposals that were put forward by the-

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, 1995, March 27th, 1995]

I am telling the whole story. He has a special case. He had a special riding created. The Northwest Territories is assigned two ridings under the Constitution. It will keep those two. They are going to be small for awhile. Some day maybe they will not be, but for the moment they are small.

Looking at the rest of the country we have tremendous diversity. The hon. member for Kindersley-Lloydminster in his speech mentioned British Columbia. There are significant differences in population in ridings in British Columbia. I do not think there were any in the last proposals put forward by the commission that were exceptions in that province. There may have been one before but I do not think so. I do not think there was in 1987 either. Yet still there is a fair variation.

The commissions in the province of Saskatchewan drew the boundaries very close to the limit. They stayed very close to it so there is not a big discrepancy. I congratulate the commissions on their work. However, in some provinces it is hard to do that. In some it is harder than in others. The size of the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, for example, has resulted in a difference of view as to whether we should have a 15 per cent limit or a 25 per cent limit in variation. The bill proposed 25; the hon. member in his amendment is proposing 15.

I suggest that his doom and gloom scenario, his suggestion that "voter equity would be almost meaningless" is not correct. Under the previous law where 25 per cent was the variation, in 1987 there were five constituencies in all of Canada that were beyond the 25 per cent limit, either above or below. One was above, four were below. That is five constituencies out of 295. It is not something that renders voter equity almost meaningless, as suggested by the hon. member.

In the 1994 redistribution proposals that the commissions completed that the hon. member for Kindersley-Lloydminster says were so unpopular with Liberal members and I say were unpopular in large part with his own-he does not like to talk about that-

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, 1995, March 27th, 1995]

In principle. I recognize the principle of effective representation, which is the principle we are striving for as set out in section 19 of the act. Coincidentally it is the principle enunciated by the Supreme Court of Canada in its decision with respect to redistribution in the province of Saskatchewan, where the hon. member for Kindersley-Lloydminster resides and which he knows quite a lot about I suspect. The principle demands that in determining effective representation one looks at more than the number of electors residing in a particular geographic area.

We looked at this. We looked at Canada as a whole. We looked at the maps and we heard from members of Parliament from across the country who came to the committee and expressed their views on what effective representation meant. They told us about the problems they have in representing electors in some of the remote ridings.

Strangely, the hon. member for Labrador did not come. Yet it is one of the ridings that has been accepted for some time as a separate riding under the current redistribution rules. He did not come to complain to the committee that he had grave difficulty in representing his riding. Some of us know some of the problems he has.

The hon. member for Nunatsiaq who has over one million square kilometres in his riding-one-third of the country is in his constituency-did not come to the committee to complain about the problems he faces. However, there is not much he can do. He has a small population but they are scattered over an area that would make most of us blush-

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, 1995, March 27th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, so far I agree with the position of the hon. member for Bellechasse concerning the amendments put forth by the hon. member for Kinderley-Lloydminster. I am pleased to speak after him in this debate because he has set out so clearly the major aspects of this issue.

I also want to make my own point to the hon. member for Kindersley-Lloydminster. I know he has had lots of practice in making that speech.

We considered this question in committee in the days of when we were deciding what to do. The House had a debate on this issue in referring the matter to the committee. The issue was first raised then. We studied it in committee and made a report to the House. We had a motion for concurrence at which time this was one of the hotly debated issues and we heard the hon. member for Kindersley-Lloydminster then.

We had a bill for second reading which was passed without debate, but then in committee we went back into this issue as we studied this clause in the bill. We made some changes that the hon. member for Kindersley-Lloydminster did not like. I see that one of his amendments is to delete those good changes.

Then we come back to the House and here we have it again. I will lay dollars to doughnuts that we are going to hear the same debate from the hon. member on third reading. He is persistent, I grant him that and he has had lots of practice giving his speech.

I enjoyed his remarks this afternoon. I know he had hoped he had convinced me that we should agree to some changes in this part of the bill and accept his amendments. I do not agree with the amendments he has put forward and I want to give him, the

House and Canadians the reason the government is not agreeing with these amendments.

I listened to the evidence. After hearing all the evidence, I came to my conclusion. It is a good conclusion and I invite the hon. member to support it.

What he said was that as a result of the changes in this bill voter equity was almost meaningless. I have to disagree with that. The essential principle dealing with redistribution in Canada is set out in clause 19(1) of this bill. If he goes back to that basic principle, I think he will agree with me that what we did was right. It says:

The principle that shall guide each commission in preparing a report is that effective representation be the paramount consideration in determining reasonable electoral district boundaries in the province for which the commission is established.

As a person who represents a mixed rural and urban riding, but almost all urban, I would have expected that equality would require every riding in Canada to be the same size in terms of the number of electors.

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, 1995, March 27th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I would ask that the motions be taken has having been read before the House, rather than having the Speaker read each of them.