Hon. John M. Reid (Kenora-Rainy River):

Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the Hon. Member for Prince Edward-

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Hastings (Mr. Ellis) for bringing this subject to our attention at this time. It is a timely subject because we are just on the eve of the redistribution order going out which will make into law the recommendations of the redistribution commissions across Canada.

I can sympathize with his remarks about rural constituencies. When I was first elected in 1965,1 had a small, compact riding of approximately 45,000 square miles. As a result of two redistributions, it is now 155,000 square miles. I can understand the pressures that rural Members come under in trying to serve ever-increasing geographical areas as well as ever-increasing numbers of people scattered over a wider geographical base. There is no question that it makes life more difficult for those Members and that it also reduces the quality of the representation that people in rural areas get because their Members are spread over such a wide distance.

Having said that, I think I should return to the terms of the Bill and point out to the Hon. Member and the House that, according to the Constitution of Canada, we are obliged to have a redistribution of parliamentary seats after each census. I was the Parliamentary Secretary to two Presidents of the Privy Council in the 1970s who had the responsibility of bringing forward the current legislation based on what we call the amalgam method.

I recall very well the original Bill for redistribution as put forward by the then President of the Privy Council, the current Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for External Affairs (Mr. MacEachen). That Bill provided that there would be a redistribution in which there would be a decrease in the House of Commons of one seat from 265 to 264. Hon. Members will recall the outcry, the outrage and the viciousness of the attacks on the Government not only from the four Opposition Parties in those days but from the back-benchers on the government side at the horrendous changes the redistribution Bill would have made to the House of Commons. What it would do in effect is to take away seats from five or six provinces and redistribute them to Ontario and, I believe, to British Columbia. There was a vicious debate that went on over a period of time until the Government got the message and, at the final moment, intercepted with a piece of legislation that interrupted the process. It was clear from that debate and the arguments in the House of Commons and in committee that the House was not prepared to accept a redistribution that would involve the loss of seats to smaller provinces.

As a result of that commitment, which the Government was forced to accept, the Standing Committee on Privileges and Elections was re-established to look into the matter, and the Government, after the election of 1974, came down with a series of proposals which were put before that committee.

One of the problems is that the Constitution of Canada provides for a form of representation in the House of Commons based on representation by population. We have never done that in the absolute. We have always tended in that direction but we have never attempted to apply that principle

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across the board. We have always recognized that there are very large provinces, very small provinces, and some in the middle. We have always recognized that provinces require a certain level of representation in the House of Commons. There have been a number of formulae in various Acts which have protected the position of small provinces. It was really not until the great demographic changes of our country in the 1950s and 1960s, which led up to the redistribution of the 1970s, that we realized that the old system would no longer work. Therefore, a drastic overhaul was called for.

In the case of the proposition that representation was a major point of the exercise, three other principles also were developed to protect it.

The first was that no province could have fewer Members of Parliament than it had Senators. This principle protected, for example, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. This principle was added in 1915. The second principle was that no province could lose more than 15 per cent of its representation in a redistribution. This was added in 1952. The third principle was that no province could have fewer Members in the House of Commons than a province with a smaller population.

The problem was how to balance all of these conflicting problems. Furthermore, how could you balance these conflicting problems in light of what happened from 1972 to 1974 when it was clear that the House would no longer accept the principle that provinces could lose seats? Even with these three principles, the provinces had to be protected.

The difficulty was finding a new system. When the Privileges and Elections Committee met in 1974, it had five propositions before it which were designed to give the committee a variety of options. The committee, after investigating, chose the one which the Government proposed, the amalgam method. Why? Because that seemed to satisfy the requirements. As a result, the committee accepted it with a certain amount of enthusiasm. When the committee examined what could be done with the other four recommendations which the Government had presented, it decided that the amalgam method made the most sense. Second, the committee cast its net as broadly as it could among those few experts in Canada who knew anything about redistribution, and it was unable to come up with any other interpretation that would be satisfactory. The consequence was that, with some minor amendments, we ended up with the amalgam system and it went into effect in the redistribution which took place in the election of 1979.

I can certainly agree with the Hon. Member for Prince Edward Hastings that every sitting Member at that time who went through the redistribution found it an extraordinarily painful process. The problem we face today is that this is the second redistribution under that formula. As the Hon. Member for Prince Edward Hastings noted, the size of the House will increase substantially.

Mr. Reid (Kenora-Rainy River):

I was here, like many other Members, when the House consisted of 264 Members. When we had the elections in 1979 and 1980, I was rather overwhelmed with the impact that another 12 Members could make in the House of Commons. But nonetheless I believe the question has to be looked at basically from the view of the smaller provinces, and whether or not their position in Confederation would be better or worse. Second, what will be the quality of representation available to the rural areas. If you do not increase the number of seats, then clearly any redistribution that takes place will quickly move seats from the rural areas into the cities. We all know why. The cities are growing more rapidly than the rural areas. Third, we know that population is moving from smaller provinces to the larger provinces. Fourth, if we do not provide additional seats, these tendencies will be hastened with a smaller House and will be made far more difficult.

I was of the opinion that the proposals of the Right Hon. John George Diefenbaker, who led the charge against the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act of 1972, would, in effect, have an adverse impact on his home province of Saskatchewan, on Manitoba, and on the Maritimes. It struck me that those provinces were better off with a system in a smaller House where their Members would have more clout than in a bigger House where their Members would make up a smaller proportion of the whole. I argued that point with Members from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and the Maritimes. But so overpoweringly difficult was the concept that provinces would lose seats, that some provinces would come down to their Senate floor, and that some provinces would have enormous problems of compression when it came to the redistribution of seats that, by and large, they opted for the easy way out, which was to expand the membership. Having done that, and having agreed to that proposition, we ended up with the question: if you added 12 Members, what would be the status the next time? Could you just live with the increase of 12 Members? When you examined the demographics of the situation, you came immediately to the proposition that you could not, that you would end up with exactly the same proposition in the next redistribution. Therefore, the amalgam method was designed to provide a controlled increase of the House over three redistributions where it was thought it would level off and hold.

We are debating whether or not this should go forth. I believe that we have to look back to what our reactions were in the 1972 to 1974 period. It is my view that we cannot ignore the judgment we made at that point. Those of us who represented rural ridings know what happened even with the

increase in seats. My constituency in the Province of Ontario, which received seven additional seats, I believe, tripled in geographical size, and in terms of population increased from about 52,000 to about 78,000, an increase of over 50 per cent. The representation of those people in that geographical area is a very difficult job for whoever happens to be the Hon. Member for Kenora-Rainy River.

This was not an isolated case. If we take a look at rural Canada and at rural Ontario, we find that the rural ridings expanded pretty well all over, except those which had a significant urban population moving into the edge of it, for example, Nepean-Carleton at one point.

The dilemma is how we provide representation which will be acceptable. As a result of the premises which I have outlined that no province should lose seats, that no province should be in a position of going below its Senate numbers and that no province should have fewer Members in the House than a province with a smaller population, if we accept those principles we are in a conundrum. We would be in a conundrum if we stopped it at the population of the House of Commons today, at 282.

I doubt the redistribution commissioners would be any more successful in satisfying the House now than they were in 1974 when their last propositions came forward. It seems to me that that is the nub of the problem. The nub of the problem is how we represent all parts of Canada on an equal base. How do we represent all parts of Canada on a relatively equal population base or on a relatively equivalent regional base? In other words, how do we square the circle?

When we studied the present system in committee, we realized that it was certainly not perfect. It has great difficulties. It operates in some ways very irrationally, according to the formula we have laid down, but only because the conditions we have built into the formula are somewhat contradictory and somewhat irrational. Therefore, I regret that I cannot support that proposition of the Hon. Member for Prince Edward-Hastings (Mr. Ellis) because it does not deal with the conundrum facing us at this time. I know that he and the Hon. Member for Red Deer (Mr. Towers) have been very aggressive in arguing the point that we should stop. However, it seems to me that where they have been deficient is in not being able to tell us how to resolve the very real regional, provincial and local conundrums into which we keep running.

Ideally it would have been practical to put into place the original proposition of the then President of the Privy Council, the present Secretary of State for External Affairs (Mr. MacEachen), but it was unacceptable. If the Government had come before the House with a similar Bill today, it too would have been unacceptable. It would have been acceptable to certain provinces in the West. Certainly it would have been acceptable to many provinces in the East, but probably it would have been unacceptable to Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia as well. We have a very real problem in balancing the considerations of locality, provinciality and regionalism.

June 19, 1984

I should like to go one step further and talk about the Bill presented by the Hon. Member for Prince Edward-Hastings. There is a bit of a technical problem with the proposition he has raised. In dealing with some of the details of this matter, it would be helpful for Hon. Members to understand just exactly what are some of our problems. Let me start first by looking at the explanatory notes to the Bill. They indicate:

The relative representation of the various provinces is determined by a formula found in Rules 1 to 6 of Section 51 in which one province, Quebec, serves as a reference point.

That is partly right and partly wrong. It is true that there is a base number of seats for Quebec. This is stated in Rule 1 under Subsection 51(1) of the Constitution Act. The number of seats allocated to Quebec is to rise at each subsequent redistribution by four. Under Rule 2, the electoral quotient for Quebec is divided into the population of each large province to determine the membership of the large province in the House of Commons. A large province is defined as any province other than Quebec having a population of more than 2.5 million. Following the 1971 census, only Ontario was categorized as a large province. Following the 1981 census, British Columbia was also included in this category.

The technical problem with the Bill is that the number of Members for small provinces, that is those with less than 1.5 million people, and for intermediate provinces, that is between 1.5 million and 2.5 million people, is calculated independently from the electoral quotient for Quebec. There is no relationship between their quotient and that for Quebec.

For small provinces, an electoral quotient is obtained by dividing their total population at the penultimate decennial census by the number of Members assigned to those provinces in the readjustment following the completion of that census. In other words, the practice is completely different, taking into account this census and the last census, as opposed to how we calculated for the large province where it is only done on the basis of population for that particular census.

Having done that, the quotient is then divided into the population of each province at the most recent census to determine its representation in the House of Commons. The Senate floor rule then comes into play. It prevents any province from having fewer seats than the number of Senators who sit for that province in the Senate. In the redistribution which led to the Representation Order proclaimed on June 11, 1976, the computation resulted only in Prince Edward Island being entitled to one seat and New Brunswick to nine. However, the Senate floor rule raised Prince Edward Island to four and New Brunswick to 10.

If Hon. Members thought that was difficult, they should look at the computation for what is called the intermediate provinces. It is more complicated. Again it is not determined by the electoral quotient for the Province of Quebec. It is calculated independently. In the last redistribution we had only two provinces in that category-British Columbia and Alberta. Under the present redistribution, British Columbia has moved into the large province size and Alberta is the only province which sits in the intermediate sector. I think Hon.

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Members understand the difficulty with the proposal of the Hon. Member for Prince Edward-Hastings.

Mr. Reid (Kenora-Rainy River):

The question we now have to decide is whether that redistribution should take place,

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whether it will provide better representation for Canadians, whether it will be neutral or whether it will produce less representation for Canadians. Like the Hon. Member for Prince Edward Hastings, my own personal prejudice, quite frankly, is toward a smaller House. I would prefer a smaller House.

Mr. Reid (Kenora-Rainy River):

I hear the Hon. Member for Hamilton Mountain (Mr. Deans). We tried to provide when we were discussing this matter a method which would be unassailable, that no person, not even the most devout proponent of the existing system, could possibly find unfair. We tried to make it more palatable for the Government and we included two not one representatives from Cabinet on the board. I felt that was somewhat excessive, but I recognized the fear which the Government had that Members might act irresponsibly. It was certainly culpable because of the reluctance to allow anyone else on the committee before, but probably as an interim measure this was as good as we could get.

If we take a look at the proposals we have produced we find that they meet the requirements the Hon. Member for Edmonton West has put forward in terms of fairness, being logical and disturbing the Government probably less than it might be disturbed in its desire to control the affairs of the House of Commons.

I confess that as a former Parliamentary Secretary to the House Leader, that is to the President of the Privy Council- of course not the current one-I often felt that because of the responsibility of the President of the Privy Council for the Commissioners of Internal Economy, he tried to run the House of Commons as if it were a branch of his own Department. In fact, I often felt there were dangerous tendencies on the part of

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Presidents of the Privy Council to regard the operations of the House of Commons as they regarded the operations of their own offices. I think it is an instinctive reaction because of the unique position in which the House of Commons Act puts the President of the Privy Council. Basically he carries responsibility for the Estimates and, by and large through the Council, he has the responsibility to veto spending propositions. In point of fact, the way in which financial reporting was established, he had power over the operations of the House of Commons as if it were in fact his own Department.

One proposal we made was an attempt to break that kind of absolute control with which the President of the Privy Council tended to feel he was blessed by the House of Commons Act, by trying to demonstrate that there were wider interests to be considered as well. I might say that the President of the Privy Council often shared that power and authority, particular aspects of it, with the Speaker and with Opposition Parties. It was never a total one-way thing, but the responsibility, as the Act was interpreted and implemented, certainly led the President of the Privy Council to feel that he was responsible for the conduct of business in the House of Commons.

I think that approach communicated itself to the Government. One tendency I have seen over the last five years or six years which I regard as quite undesirable has been the overtaking of the administration of the House of Commons by the Government. For example, there has been the change in the control over the grounds outside from the House of Commons to the Department of Public Works. That is one item which I find most unfortunate. I feel the House of Commons and the Senate should be much more co-operative in order to fight off the imperatives of various government Departments as they try to take over more and more of the precincts of Parliament. It is recognized by all that they can play a very useful consultative role, particularly as the precincts of Parliament have grown substantially over the last 10 years.

As a result we have another proposal in our report which requires the establishment of a joint committee on parliamentary services between the House of Commons and the Senate. We feel that would lead to a quick resolution of a number of duplications of services that have continued to plague us, and of the difficulties we have had from time to time in terms of the jurisdiction of the building.

As Hon. Members will recognize, there has been a tendency for the jurisdictions to clash. I think we are all aware of the last example, but I think I should mention it. It occurred when a decision was made on the House of Commons side to have a different form of security clearance than Members of the other House were prepared to accept. There was a clash between the representatives of those chambers.

Putting in place a mechanism such as the committee recommended would go a long way toward eliminating those kinds of problems and making life in this building that we share much more harmonious than it has been from time to time. We do have a number of joint committees. For example, there is the joint committee on the library, the joint committee on the

June 18, 1984

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restaurant, and a number of others. Unfortunately, for reasons beyond my knowledge at the present time, the chairmen have not called meetings of those committees. We have not had an opportunity in those committees to review the activities that properly are the responsibility of clearly defined committees within the responsibility of the Standing Orders of both Members of the Elouse and Members of the Senate.

It has always been a source of amazement to me, and from time to time I have made inquiries, that the mechanisms in place to provide for the calling of these meetings were never really activated. With the new rule that emanated from the third report of the special committee, I hope that kind of situation will no longer continue. It strikes me that once Members give up their rights to sit, meet and discuss the business of how the House of Commons operates, they give them up to the bureaucracy, the Government or a party leadership. That is undesirable. We have suffered from the effects of these neglects. In my judgment, we have only ourselves to blame because we as a group have not brought pressure to bear on our respective caucus organizations and leaderships.

I agree with the thrust that the Hon. Member for Edmonton West has developed over the last ten years on this matter. He has been a leader in these matters. He has correctly pointed out on every occasion he has been able to find in the House how we have cheated ourselves of a perhaps much different kind of administration in the House of Commons. I am delighted that he has again had an opportunity to put forward his message. I am pleased to inform him that in point of fact the Special Committee on Standing Orders and Procedure did take into account the representations he has been making over the last ten years. It did put some effort into a discussion of the problem. It has come down with a report which we believe is clear, concise and acceptable to Members on all sides and, hopefully to the Party leadership on all sides.

I hope that when the new Parliament is called into being one of the first items will be, not the calling of the old forum of the Commission of Internal Economy but, instead, a recognition by the new Prime Minister that as an interim step the commissioners of economy should be expanded by calling on Members of the House of Commons who are Privy Councillors, but not necessarily Members of the Cabinet, to serve on this committee, and that at an appropriate time a Bill will be brought forward to amend the Senate and House of Commons Act to allow Members who are not Privy Councillors to sit on this committee as well, the way the committee has recommended.

Hon. John M. Reid (Kenora-Rainy River):

Mr. Speaker, I can only say it is very odd to rise in the House of Commons to speak after two distinguished gentlemen who have both indicated they may each have made their last speech. I would like to pay tribute to the Hon. Member for Edmonton West (Mr. Lambert) who has been a prominent force in the House of Commons for as long as I have been here. He is a former Speaker of the House and has always taken a very active interest in the proceedings of the House of Commons' committees on procedure. He has also taken a very prominent role in financial measures before the House of Commons.

I also regret that my friend, the Hon. Member for Rose-mount (Mr. Lachance) is leaving. It seems to me that he and I have spent the last year working together on the Special Committee on Procedural Reform for the House of Commons. I have come to know him and to appreciate him in ways that I had not before this opportunity came about. I think the House will be poorer for the loss of both these hon. gentlemen.

One of the things that always impressed me about the hon. gentleman from-