Thank you, Madam Chair. I, too, would like to thank the Electoral Boundaries Commission for the work they did. We asked the commission to look at the three options. In hindsight, perhaps we should have asked them to come up with options for each of the three options. That might have been able to encompass more scenarios.
I think, at the risk of repeating what others have said, we are 42,000 people here in the Northwest Territories with 19 MLAs. So when you average that out, the average population to have effective representation would be approximately 2,200 people. We all know that the Northwest Territories is the only jurisdiction in Canada whose population has been declining. It hasn’t been a significant decline. I think it has been 0.1 or 0.2 percent and 100 to 200 people per year. I think what’s been happening is the trends are people are moving from the smaller centres to the larger centres.
With regard to how many MLAs it takes to run a government, I think the answer does not lie in increasing the number of MLA seats. We should realign boundaries because population dynamics are shifting. We shouldn’t be increasing seats because the population is moving around, so to just resolve the problem, we’ll add one or two more seats. I think the answer lies in realigning the boundaries.
We are a consensus government. We don’t have political parties, so we don’t have to worry about gerrymandering when it comes to setting electoral boundaries. I agree that we should do our best to represent culture and language wherever possible, but we also need to have equal and effective representation as best as we can.
So my view is we gave direction to the Electoral Boundaries Commission. We should select one of the three options. I’m leaning towards 19 at this point. Thank you, Madam Chair.