Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a very interesting discussion here this afternoon. I was happy to be speaking last because I had a chance to hear everybody’s concerns. I had shared with some of the Members that we had a discussion like this quite a number of years ago when we were discussing how many MLAs we were going to have, and I rushed in and sided with some other people in an attempt to not give an extra seat to Yellowknife and it went to the courts. It ended up instead of five we ended up with seven Yellowknife MLAs. At the time, when I think about it now, it was kind of politically motivated. Yes, the Yellowknife MLAs can thank me. Friends of Democracy I’m sure didn’t appreciate it after all the court costs.
I’ve been listening to all of the discussion here today and one thing that struck me that was repeated by several people is that the last thing the people out there are saying is that we need more MLAs, then we talk very passionately about more doctors or front-line workers or nurses. Let me suggest that two more MLAs in this House could be paid for by displacing two public servants of any kind in administration. We hire an assistant deputy minister like that for far more money than what we make as MLAs. We add to the public service without even a second thought and yet we sit here and disparage ourselves and the work that we do by saying, who wants more politicians. We
disparage ourselves. Who wants more MLAs? I think MLAs…I think it’s an honourable job. I’m honoured to be called an MLA and to serve the people Anyway, I just wanted to comment on that because I heard that repeated by several people. They made it sound like MLAs were like a plague on the land or something.
Comments have also been made about the cost of democracy. It is costly, but I don’t think we count it in dollars. I mean, I think to put a price on this and say that we’re going to make a decision here based on budget restraint or fiscal policy is really missing the point completely. Once you start adjusting those boundaries on the ridings, it’s like a domino effect. So you do this one thing here and it affects something there. It’s a very tricky balance to find.
We have talked about the possibility of affecting a region or a people, as Mr. Beaulieu spoke to so passionately, that have traditionally in our territory maybe been overrepresented but have traditionally had an MLA. I think that there is some significance to that and some importance to that.
I know that the boundaries have changed. I know in Hay River there were all kinds of combinations in the past, but for a long time the people of Tu Nedhe have had an MLA and, okay, they’re overrepresented, but then that brings me to this analogy that somebody just put out here about three to one voting power.
When we come here I don’t think it’s just all about ourselves. When I come here, my gosh, well I’ve been here 18 years, but if you can come here and even be here for one year and not take on a territorial perspective on issues, then you probably shouldn’t be here. If you’re here only about your people that you represent and not everybody else, and I’ve seen that, everybody comes here with a territorial view, and there are days where we fight about this and that and we feel like sometimes we’re getting overpowered by rural and remote communities, or Yellowknife Caucus, there’s days that we feel that. But overall, and by and large, I believe that people come here with a perspective of the good of the territory. So in that sense, I don’t think we can count, oh well, they’ve got three times the amount of voice or three times the amount of representation in this House as somebody else.
It is such a small territory and if you want to play the numbers game with 41,000 or 42,000 people, really, I mean – I’m going to say something really rash here – maybe we shouldn’t even have a Legislature. We can just get annexed by Alberta, we’re just the size of small town anyway. I mean, if you want to play the numbers game seriously, we wouldn’t have Colville Lake or Enterprise or a lot of other communities if you just want to go by what is purely practical from the numbers point of view. That’s not what this territory is about.
We just sat this past weekend and heard all the Premiers’ panels about the evolution of how we’ve gone from a single Commissioner who went into the community with a chequebook and solved everybody’s problems and listened to everybody’s issues, toured into the communities, and how we devolved from there to having an elected, representative Legislature and Members sitting around this table.
So it’s an interesting debate today. I believe the process is flawed. You cannot call it an independent commission that went out there and looked at this because we were so prescriptive in what they could actually look at and what they could do. Ultimately, the decision comes back to us as legislators. I know that Mr. Abernethy said that six jurisdictions have gone to a completely independent and binding commission on electoral boundaries. I don’t know if I would support that or not. We generally tend to ask questions we don’t really want to know the answers to, from my experience on commissions.
I think that there may have been better options within the options if we would have not been so prescriptive in our instructions to the commission. Yes, there are a lot of ways we could save money. From a purely practical point of view, I served in this Legislature with 24 Members, and then after division I served with 14 Members, and then we went back to 19 Members, and something the public may not see is we do need to have a critical number of people just to do the work of committees. If you’re going to effectively consider legislation and take it out to the people for consultation, you do need a certain number of people to do that work. If you really want to save money, then I guess you could reduce the numbers for whatever, but it’s not really in keeping what the people I think really want and the work that needs to be done in this Legislature. If you’re going to have standing committees that are effective, I think you do need a critical number of people to do that work.
Right now we’re down to, on our main standing committee, five and six Members on there. It seems to work fairly well, but hey, we’ve got the desks, they’re just in storage. There used to be 24 desks in here. We didn’t throw them out.
So, Mr. Chairman, I am going to support the motion for 21 Members. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.