Dan Albas and Bill C20

I was reading Dan Albas’ MP report for October, about some upcoming changes to our laws and this thought occurred to me...

Forrest Gump says “Stupid is as Stupid does”.

Dan Albas is the MP for Okanagan_Couihalla and the link is to his website.

He is a member of the Stephen Harper Party.

Dan says in his posting “I have heard from seniors in particular of the frustration from many previous Federal elections being all but over once the Ontario elections polls closed.”

Dan, apparently you are weak on math. Let me help you Dan.

Bill C20 does in fact propose to raise the number of seats in Alberta and British Columbia. They will get six more seats each, a total of 12 new seats west of Ontario.

Ontario will get 15 additional seats under the proposed legislation and Quebec gets 3 new seats. That is a total of 18. 18 is bigger than 12. So, if the issue is that the election is almost over when the polls close in Ontario now, does that mean the election will be over when the polls close in Ontario after the proposed legislation goes into effect?

Now your buddy, Tim Uppal announced this piece of work in Brampton, Ontario. Why? Because Brampton West is poorly represented win the House of Commons, at least Tim thinks so. I think that’s the constituency that has 170,442 people in it. Wow, isn’t that like 150% of your riding’s population?

Way back in 2004, that same riding had 113,638 residents. That number is in line with the other constituencies back then. This is why we have a Constitutional redistribution of seats every ten years, even without Bill C 20. The constituency of Brampton West was going to be redrawn by 2014.

Oddly enough, the next redistribution, based on the 2011 census would likely have seen Alberta and British Columbia gain more seats than Ontario. That should enthuse your Senior Citizen constituents to no end. I used projected population numbers for the calculations and found Ontario gaining 2 seats, British Columbia 1 and Alberta 3. Unfortunately I don’t have access to the Stats Can numbers before they are publicly released so my numbers may need to be adjusted.

6 more seats versus 30 more seats and now Ontario becomes the big winner.

Your riding and my riding are not likely to change under C 20 but the big cities and their surrounding areas are going to change.

Stats Canada shows that between 2001 and 2006, the Metropolitan areas grew at 6.9%, Urban areas grew at 4.0% and Rural areas at 1.0%. Basically, when your community or mine adds another 40 people, the Metropolitan areas are adding hundreds or thousands. Or in the case of Brampton, tens of thousands.

The biggest piece of nonsense is that the proposed change in representation is not even going to be based on the 2011 census, but on projections. This is important, so I will repeat, not based on the official count produced by Stats Can of the number of people living in your Community, or your Province or even your Country, but by a projection, an estimation of how many people they think there are.

Metropolitan areas are going to gain more seats in the House no matter what, the plan of your Party, the Stephen Harper Party, will accelerate this.

Think about this every time you say “Yea” or “Nay” in the House the way you are instructed by your leader. Your face time, your voice in the caucus, everything you do in the House is going to be reduced.

Just as policy for Ontario is dictated by Toronto, the policy for British Columbia will be dictated by Vancouver. The voice of the rural voter, the small town voter is going to be diminished.

But in today’s House of Commons that is a small loss. Your say means little, your constituents’ say means less. Your job is to vote the way you are told by your leaders, the same way every other member’s vote in the house is decided.

You see, federally, democracy ended on May 2^nd at 7:00 pm Pacific Time. We will have another day of democracy in 2014, if Stephen follows his own rules.

In the run up to democracy day 2014, if the Senior Citizens in your constituency ask why the elections are all but over when the polls close in Ontario you can say “Because Stephen Harper wants it that way and I fully support him.”