Electoral Reform committee  You can't do proportionality without making rural ridings bigger.

Electoral Reform committee  You can't do two member ridings without making rural ridings bigger.

Electoral Reform committee  I can talk about the example of the north island. The southern part of the north island riding is growing very quickly, and the rest is not. What was 90:10 will soon be 92:8 and 94:6 probably. We had an opportunity in this last redistribution in which British Columbia got six ne

Electoral Reform committee  It's not workable. There have been statements here today about how all of this can be handled because we have these electoral boundaries commissions that do such a great job. Well, we went from six ridings to seven on Vancouver Island. We have the population for seven. They made

Electoral Reform committee  I do share that and to insist that there's no constitutional ramifications to doing this without the approval of the people is not correct. There would be ramifications from the provinces, from citizens groups, or from somewhere. I have no doubt this would be challenged.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes and you have to imbue your staff with the same philosophy.

Electoral Reform committee  There were some statements at the all-candidates meetings. It generated some interest, but I can tell you that in 19 years I never had somebody come to me and say, “I want a dual member district.” This is not in the conversation. In my opinion with the two referendums we had in B

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you. I actually did a little research, I'm the second-longest serving member of Parliament from Vancouver Island in the history of Canada, and the first is from the same area. His name was Alan Webster Neill. He was a Progressive and an Independent, and the Liberals never

Electoral Reform committee  Well there are other options available to a government if they don't have representation in a region. They can put people in cabinet that are not members of Parliament but are acceptable within that region. There are mechanisms. I'm not arguing for the status quo, however. My po

Electoral Reform committee  No, you're not going to get me to say that.

Electoral Reform committee  It happened very rarely. I actually had people tell me they did vote for me more often than they said they didn't. Maybe I'm different from other people, but I enjoyed working on behalf of people who did not support me, just to prove to them how wrong they were. That, over time

Electoral Reform committee  What I'm finding in a lot of this discussion is that we're really talking about the fact that people who do not vote for their member of Parliament are somehow not represented. I agree with Ms. Romanado: every MP I know is constantly trying to make their tent bigger. If they're n

Electoral Reform committee  That's not fair. We worked together on a lot.

Electoral Reform committee  Well, I happen to agree with Gordon Gibson that this is probably the most fundamental constitutional question that we have, how we elect our representatives. When he listed his three constitutional quagmires that the Prime Minister should stay away from, this was number one on hi

Electoral Reform committee  He is very familiar with citizens' assemblies, having been involved in the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform in British Columbia in 2004-05—