Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. A very important commission to the work of this Assembly has recently started travels and hearings, Mr. Speaker, into the electoral boundaries that are set for, at least at this point, the 19 ridings that make up this Assembly. The commission gave MLAs and members of the public in Yellowknife an opportunity to speak earlier this week. I wanted to take this opportunity in my statement to just do a pr‚cis of a couple of points that I made to the commission.
Mr. Speaker, the first is consideration of whether or not more ridings or more Members are needed to do the job of not only representing the people of the Northwest Territories, but also to achieve the work of the Assembly. With our ministerial style of government, I think we have a
lot of work in front of us at any one time. With a seven-Member Executive Council and 11 Members on this side, we're hard pressed sometimes to look after everything and do a good job of it. I think that right now, Mr. Speaker, one of the things that we should look at is we are in the process, through devolution and resource revenue sharing and self-government, of really fundamentally changing the nature of this Legislative Assembly over time. I think that for that reason, we should not either decrease or enlarge the size of the Assembly.
The other factor, Mr. Speaker, that comes into play is that by the numbers, four of our ridings are outside of a reasonable range of variance to a Canadian convention that 25 percent should be the threshold; 25 percent over and under-representation. I asked the commission to look at that aspect and see what adjustments could be realistically proposed in those ridings to see if we can achieve that representation by population balance. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.