Thank you, Madam Chair. Both prior to the interim report coming out and after the interim report came out, I had an opportunity to talk to constituents and residents across the Northwest Territories, to try to get a sense of what many people were thinking.
It is clear to me that what people want is better balance in the ridings through the Northwest Territories, including the under-represented areas
of Yellowknife and Monfwi. We asked the commission to do something for us. We asked them to go out and provide recommendations on 18, 19 and 21, but we did provide a legal framework for them to do that in.
Section 3 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees that every citizen in Canada has the right to vote in an election of Members of a Legislative Assembly and the constitutional right to vote is a right to effective representation.
We also know that the Supreme Court of British Columbia determined that there are constitutional limits on the unequal distribution of population between electoral districts and this sets the stage for the deviations that we all have been talking about, which is the plus or minus 25 percent. This concept was also supported and affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada.
So the right to vote enshrined in Section 3 of the Charter is not equality of voting power, but more of a right to effective representation. These are the conditions that we placed on the commission when we sent them out to come back with some recommendations. The first condition to effective representation is relative parity of voting power, but this isn’t the only thing. It’s not the only factor that needs to be considered.
As you’ve heard from other Members today, other factors must be evaluated; factors such as geography, community, history, community interest, minority representation, all these things have to be taken into consideration.
In my mind, that has limited the ability of the commission to look at what may be part of what needed to be done, which is realigning boundaries. I talked to citizens, I talked to residents and I talked to constituents and they said, yes, more balanced representation, but please, please don’t add any more MLAs. We have enough MLAs.
So they’ve come back to us with three recommendations: 18, 19 and 21. I appreciate the work they did. I know they went out and heard from the residents of the Northwest Territories and I know they gathered feedback and thought long and hard about the recommendations that came forward. I, like others, wished there was more opportunity for more recommendations under each one – under 18, under 19 and under 21 – but there aren’t. We have to make a decision based on the three.
I have difficulty with the 18 because I find the amalgamation of the two smallest ridings of the Northwest Territories in the geographic areas they cover and the fact that they are covering a wide number of languages and a large area to be troublesome. I think that would be very difficult for any MLA who happened to be elected in that riding.
I am leaning towards 19, but I do have a problem with 19, as well, because although with some slight modification it could bring all of Yellowknife within the plus or minus 25, it does leave Monfwi out. So we have a problem.
But then if we go to 21, the problem doesn’t go away, it just moves to another riding. It moves to the Sahtu. Then we have the exact same problem that we have today. So going to 21 does not solve any problems for the Northwest Territories. It does give Yellowknife maybe a little bit better representation, but it’s all washed out by the fact that we’re going to have to then put in 22 seats and if we put in 22 seats, all of a sudden we need 23 in order to balance things out. Then we’re slowly, or rather rapidly getting up to our legal limit, which is 25.
Frankly, I know that some Members have said, what is the price of democracy. I get their point, but I tend to disagree. We are a small territory with a shrinking population. We have been challenged with increasing budgets, increasing costs. Probably with salary, employer’s share of salary, our other costs, it’s probably about $230,000 to $250,000 a year. You start adding that up for two MLAs, we’re talking maybe up to $600,000 a year for two MLAs. We’re talking about $2.4 million over the term of an office. For that money, we could rightly fund community justice coordinators throughout the Northwest Territories and provide them with a living wage. We could hire two more physicians a year. We could hire four or five teachers a year. We could put additional money into mental health and addictions. We could do all these things. We don’t have those dollars today, so to fund two additional salaries for MLAs and all associated costs, we have to take that from somewhere. There’s only one place that can come from and that’s programs and services for the people of the Northwest Territories.
I don’t believe people who are struggling from mental health and addictions or living in poverty or people that are trying to make positive steps in their lives, people who want a healthy economy, want more politicians. It’s kind of a difficult situation to be in.
I agree with what some of the other Members have said here today, which is we really need to take politics out of this. Six jurisdictions in Canada have made this process binding. The recommendations from the committee are binding and I think this is something that we seriously need to look at.
So keeping all of this in mind, knowing that 18 doesn’t really work, 19 is a bit of a status quo but it leaves us in a situation where Monfwi is continuing to be under-represented, which is a problem. Moving to 21 doesn’t fix anything, it just moves the problem that Monfwi is in now to the Sahtu, and then it’s just going to continue to roll and get larger and we’ll end up with more and more MLAs. I tend
to lean towards 19, with a desire to move to a process where this is taken out of the hands of politicians and made binding.
I will end with an e-mail that I got earlier today from a resident of Yellowknife who said clearly we don’t need more MLAs. We are probably the most politically represented jurisdiction anywhere, with community governments, Aboriginal governments, school boards, health boards, Senators, MPs and 19 MLAs to represent 42,000 people. What we do need more of is medical professionals, teachers, not more politicians. I tend to agree. Thank you, Madam Chair.