Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just a couple quick comments and I appreciated the discussions and many of the viewpoints raised and I agree with many, if not most.
I’d say – without detracting from Mrs. Groenewegen’s point about the role of MLAs, which I agreed with – nobody wants more MLAs and a
more expensive government if we can avoid it. That’s the key part. Yet, given our current process, just about the only way we can achieve fair representation is by adding MLAs.
I think Mr. Miltenberger laid out a very key point, we haven’t asked how much government do we need. Many of us have asked that informally, and certainly the public has asked that informally, and we know we have a large government. So that question is important, but we have not had the discussion about how many MLAs we need and what form the government should take. Without this we are finessed into considering the number of MLAs we need for fair representation under the current form of government. Mr. Bouchard made reference to that, as well, and how fair representation can be made to achieve it. So, without knowing the form of government with a reduced number of MLAs, for example, we’re buying a pig in a poke.
I know that many of us looked at previous debates in preparing ourselves for this discussion today and so I want to lay this out. If we don’t get around to it, I hope any future government that gets into this discussion, perhaps in trying to come up with directions for the Electoral Boundaries Commission, that they would have the discussion on what form of government; you know, how many MLAs do we need, how much government do we need, and can we come up with a form of consensus government that makes effective use of that number.
Mr. Bouchard, as I said, raised a point there, and it’s relevant. We need to have a balance between, Regular MLAs and Cabinet, and so it talks about its relevant to the size of the Cabinet we need and so on and their workloads, blah, blah, blah.
I just wanted to raise that point. One other thing was, I guess Premier McLeod raised the point that we need to be able to move boundaries around. I mentioned, as well, I don’t think we have had the fortitude to do that because it’s a tough job. The 25 percent has often been discussed condescendingly here, but it’s there to give us flexibility to deal with language and cultural group issues. When we exceed it, that’s when the flags are going up that we’re not dealing with those.
I’ll leave it at that. Again, in terms of resolving the representation thing, which is not the only issue but we want to consider language and cultural groups within it, the best improvement is the 21 issue. We’re left with only three and one under and over, or sorry, overrepresented and under-represented. The 19 is five compared to three overrepresented, and two compared to one under-represented. For the 18, it’s four and one.