Thank you, Madam Chair. I just wanted to comment on the motion. As a member of the Board of Management, I don’t want the public out there thinking that the government sent the Electoral Boundaries Commission out without giving it some guiding principles. I think, first and foremost, the commission subscribed to some general principles. Voter parity was obviously the goal, where possible. Where voter parity wasn’t practicable, and there were significant community of interest considerations present, deviations from voter parity could be justified provided that effective representation wouldn’t be sacrificed. The community of interest considerations include geographical factors, the population distribution in smaller communities, common bonds such as language, culture and history, land claim and self-government agreements, and if inequality between electoral districts could not be avoided, wherever possible overrepresentation is preferable to under-representation. When the Member talks about fair representation, does that equal voter parity? I think that’s what he’s getting at.
The instructions were straightforward to the Electoral Boundaries Commission. I don’t think it does us much good to say that, in all the people that spoke to the commission, the commission itself that went out and did the work on behalf of the people of the Northwest Territories and this government, we’re going to just say let’s do this all over again. Let’s have a replay. If we did have a replay of this, it would come back, in my estimation, to be pretty much the exact same thing. So either we deal with it today or we deal with it whenever a new commission could be constituted and get the work done, probably looking at anywhere between nine months and a year before it would get back to this Assembly for consideration. Again, I don’t think we would have dealt with getting the politics out of the electoral boundaries issue. Again, until we deal with that, I think it’s kind of fruitless to go back out
and get a new commission established and out there. Again, I think they had instructions. We can try to change the instructions, but it’s not going to do anybody any good, I don’t believe. I think we have to deal with the report that we have and just move forward. Thank you.