Canadian House of Commons to Expand

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/10/14/pol-harper-new-seats.html

So Harper is going to add more seats to rebalance the House of Commons to reflect population growth. He has also hinted that he'll keep Quebec's proportion of seats the same (which I presume is to prevent a quebecois backlash).

Two things:

• Do you agree with adding more seats rather than rebalancing existing seats?
• Should Quebec get to maintain its proportion of seats?

Uh... shouldn't it be proportional to population? I mean, there really aren't that many people in Canada, so it's not like you necessarily need that many guys to run a country, and so it's not that hard to keep it proportional...

As for Quebec, do they get some kind of special privilege or something?

Quebec's population grew slower in relation to Ontario/Alberta/British Columbia, so they would lose seats in the eventual remapping of ridings (electoral districts). But, they're always very fussy about political power and rights, so they are going to throw a huge hissy fit if they lose seats (and any provincial party that doesn't want to die horribly will support that populist movement).

I rather add seats than rebalance myself because I like to keep the number of representatives high, allowing local people to bitch more personally at M Ps.

It's normally roughly proportional to population but you know how politics is like. One province gets uppity and gets slightly more seats than they should and so on. Ontario usually less seats by proportion because the government is here, so might as well throw the other guys a bone.

...so... is there actually a problem, here?

Well I just posted the two questions, would you prefer a rebalancing versus adding seats... and would you support keeping Quebec's seat proportion despite their relative population.

My question is, is there a problem with the way they've chosen to do it?

I don't know much about Canadian politics, except that they're the British style... with bits tacked on.

Depends.

More M Ps means more seats, which does mean more politicians to support. At the same time, this means more representatives to talk to people directly. So the government gets larger and thus possibly harder to maintain a steady majority opinion (but with whipped voting, that might not matter). It costs more money to have more politicians.

As for Quebec, it's a question of whether you think they deserve to have a special privilege. Would a separatist cry start up again if we don't give them seats? Interestingly here, is if Harper gives in to Quebec's demands, he would be directly harming his own position. Why you ask, well he's virtually no support in Quebec. Quebec does like to pick winners but not completely at the expense of themselves, so Harper's choices in the future would be to give into more Quebec demands (but his foot-in-mouth disease while campaigning in Quebec makes it a futile cause), or not give them more seats and risk his already zero popularity there.

...well, I personally don't think Quebec should get special privilege, but I don't support their independence, so...

Funnily, our Commons is set to shrink...

Well, it sounds like a good idea to increase seats. If they did, there would be by-elections right?

However, that runs into the issue that elections outside of local and general are used, effectively, as public opinion polls, so the 'new' seats may not be as representative of its constituents.

I'm not sure when the seats would roll in but I presume next election.

Oh, well in that case, there'd be no problems. I'm sure the Canadian populace are okay with the pay of MPs in the Commons, right?

You guys use PR or FPTP?

FPTP and the pay in my opinion is reasonable, others might disagree.

I am good with this.