Procedure and House Affairs committee  Whatever the definition of community of interest is, it has to be applied equally. The way the boundaries commissions have traditionally applied it has often been to look at smaller communities with less population. Why don't visible minorities or suburban voters also constitute

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Do you mean that if Bill C-20 were not passed?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I did some numbers on that. In 2021 prior to redistribution, using StatsCan projections, which of course are projections, Ontario would have about 123,000 people per riding; Alberta, just under 123,000; and British Columbia, 134,000, whereas the rest of the provinces would be a

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There would be, I guess, 30 additional seats in this round, and you would add something in the range of an additional 20 the next time. So there is a consequence for--

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Would the ideal representation formula be one purely based on representation by population? I think that's probably correct. But given that we have certain constitutional constraints, how can we work within those? If you remove the grandfather clause, what you're saying is, some

Procedure and House Affairs committee  In the sixties, as Professor Wiseman mentioned, we had a formula that removed seats from certain provinces. Then in the seventies, we came up with the amalgam method, as Professor Sancton mentioned, which was mainly to prevent those provinces from losing seats. The political pres

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Then the issue is whether it is fair to reduce seats for some of the slower-growing provinces and not for others. I think we would really need to consider whether that's a proper—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The act grants the boundary commissions the discretion to operate within the 25% range. One option they could have taken was to say we're not going to use that range unless we really need to.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Historically they haven't; currently they have. They operate well within that range and consider that normal. So the consequence is for suburban voters; they're underrepresented as a whole compared to rural voters. But you can see that suburban voters are underrepresented compare

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I would say probably yes. You'd need to look at which specific ridings would qualify, but I don't think boundary commissions should have that discretion, because they end up using it to over-represent some ridings and under-represent others, where there's less of a case than ther

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's an interesting question. You'd have to look at geographic size. It could be ridings that are physically really large. You could draw on the expertise of boundary commissions, where they have traditionally found ridings to be over-represented. But--

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you very much for having me here today. Merci de m'avoir invité. I'm going to talk about two main things in my brief remarks here: first, about the positive steps forward that I believe Bill C-20 is taking, and second, to raise a couple of possible amendments or other re