msb@lsuc.UUCP (03/20/85)
manis@ubc-cs.UUCP (Vince Manis) writes: > I suggest a tricameral setup: a House of Commons (where the actual power > resides); a House of Provinces (elected representatives of each province, > a la the US Senate); and a House of Patronage, where the hacks go. Amusing idea, especially if you went to university at Waterloo, where "hack" means what other places call "hacker". I could go for THAT! We'd have legislation that worked even though nobody could understand it... :-) I think most people in the more populous provinces feel that any US Senate type scheme would be pretty silly. How can we have a fair representative government unless the representation is by population? The present situation in the Commons, where PEI and the territories have 7 seats instead of 2, is silly enough, but usually doesn't have much effect. I don't see why the Atlantic provinces should get disproportionately many seats in any house just because they never decided to go for efficiency-of-scale and become one province. Please don't attribute all of this feeling to the fact that I live in Ontario now. In my personal feelings, I really don't care about provinces at all, and Toronto means much more to me than Ontario. What I want is a unicameral elected government -- with representation by population. (To digress, there have been a couple of proposals for second houses that I like. One is a second house based on occupations. So if there are 70,000 programmers and 7,000,000 housespouses in Canada [to pull numbers out of a hat], maybe we have 1 programmer member and 100 housewife members. Another alternative, becoming more practical nowadays, is to make the public at large the second house -- Parliament proposes bills but the electorate must ratify them. Then we'd really get what we deserve!) Finally, because it's vaguely relevant, I throw in some statistics I collected recently on the number of members of the Commons and of the provincial/territorial legislatures...MPs and, to use Ontario style, MPPs. I also give the number of Senators from each province; my source for these is from 1976, but I don't think the numbers have changed. The populations given for the different provinces are 1983 estimates, thus more recent than the latest redistributions. Notice how the Pop/MPP rises as the population falls! (Pop/MP, of course, is fairly constant -- until you get to the last 3 lines) PROVINCE #MPs #MPPs #Sen's Population Pop/MP Pop/MPP Pop/Sen Ontario 95 125 24 8,880,100 93,475 71,041 370,004 Quebec 75 122 24 6,514,600 86,861 53,398 271,442 British Columb. 28 57 6 2,818,000 100,643 49,439 469,667 Alberta 21 79 6 2,345,400 111,686 29,689 390,900 Manitoba 14 57 6 1,044,600 74,614 18,326 174,100 Saskatchewan 14 64 6 990,700 70,464 15,480 165,117 Nova Scotia 11 52 10 858,300 78,027 16,506 85,830 New Brunswick 10 58 10 705,200 70,520 12,159 70,520 Newfoundland 7 52 6 576,200 82,314 11,081 96,033 P. E. I. 4 32 4 124,200 31,050 3,881 31,050 N. W. Terr. 2 24 0 48,400 24,200 2,017 no rep Yukon Terr. 1 16 0 22,300 22,300 1,394 no rep Mark Brader