The Great Canadian Parliamentary Seat Increase!
- Thread starter Colpy
- Start date
Holy crap, a number of Albertans on this forum seem to have a great deal of neurotic and paranoid delusions. Just because someone disagrees with you does not mean they are attacking you for being an Albertan. Holy Paxil Batman. Will the cognitive dissonance be following forthwith?
Not at all. But when I get called a "whining westerner" for pointing out and explaining an obvious injustice, it's difficult not to wonder about the respondent's motives. Or maybe I'm just missing the sarcasm?
As often as it takes for the party which is doing the tinkering to receive a majority mandate.
PS
Not "sarcasm', rather "irony."
PS
Not "sarcasm', rather "irony."
People can read where I'm from, can't they?
Yes, 10 years, as it should be. But you seem to be missing the point. A redistribution after 2011 will only exacerbate the existing problem, and it will get worse the longer the imbalance goes uncorrected. S.51 provides that each province will have a number of members equal to the population of the province divided by 1/279 the population of all the provinces. Fine. AB, BC and ON all comply under this formula. However, the remaining provinces are then "topped up" to prevent them from losing any seats, taking the total from all the provinces (excl. the territories) to 307. SK should have 9, not 14, PEI 1 not 4, NL 5 not 7, and so on.
Such changes have been made before -in 1946, 1952, 1975 and 1985 - and the proposed amendment seeks to partially correct the imbalances caused by the previous changes. But I doubt that this will change anyone's mind.
And I don't think that it would automatically help the CPC. ON and BC would get the bulk of the seats, not AB, mostly in Toronto and Vancouver, neither of which wholeheartedly support the CPC.
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sorry to be pedantic, but your statement is inaccurate. a province can lose seats during a decennial redistribution, provided the number is not below that province's seat count as of March 6, 1986.
since you've encouraged us all to read the Constitution Act, I've quoted the relevant section here - for you as much as us, apparently - bolding mine:
Constitution Act said:
Note 27 said:
Read it again carefully; you have misunderstood its application. In 1986 (the Act was passsed in 1985 but did not come into force until 1986), SK and MB each had 14 seats, PQ had 75, NB 10, NS 11, PEI 4 and NL 7. These are the numbers that they now have, and those numbers cannot be reduced below what they had on that date, so...figure it out.
Under the present s.51, no province can have fewer members than they had in 1986.Though the section applies to all provinces, it works to the benefit of those with shrinking populations (relative or absolute) and to the detriment of those which are growing.
"A solution there might be to give the MLA from a remote rural area larger funding so they can maintain two or three offices," he said.
Give them much more money to travel, but make all votes equal. Anything else is simply corruption.
Cities are the most dynamic part of the country, to deny them political influence restricts the growth and potential of the entire country. Let's commit slow national economic suicide. Aren't we in a recession?
Excellent post. It's a real problem. An electoral boundaries commission should be set up to deal with it rather than a committe of MLAs.
Yes. We can all read. You're from Alberta. My point was, even assuming that you were right about Gerry's intentions, that he wouldn't be disagreeing with you because you're an Albertan, but because you're a westerner. That was the language he used afterall. You should ask him where he lives.
I read it several times before posting, and I understand it quite clearly. my contention was with your blanket statement that, "No province can lose seats in a decennial redistribution, no matter how its population may have declined relative to the national total," which is inaccurate. if you had specified that no province could lose a seat in the upcoming adjustment because today's numbers are the same as 1986, your statement would have been accurate. I didn't point it out to start an argument, because the discrepancy has no bearing on the point you were making; I pointed it out so that anyone reading the thread wouldn't mistake the facts based on your statement. perhaps I shouldn't have bothered?
Point taken. I should have been more precise, and said that none of the seven shrinking or slower growing provinces could lose seats.
Yep, I'm sure there are all kinds of reasons, but there is one BIG reason against it- THE COST OF EXPANDING THE TROUGH.