Senator Dasko: Thank you. Senator Dawson, listening to your presentation, I think I heard one mention of the principle of representation by population. I wonder whether that principle is becoming eroded more and more. My province of Ontario is under-represented in terms of seats. If I do the math on the total number of seats that you have, 343, the province of Ontario should be getting 137 seats out of this, given that we have 40% of the population.

But how many seats are we actually getting under this? Is it 122? We currently have 121. If you do the math and add 1, it’s 122. To me, that shows clearly that there is not representation by population. Perhaps we’re moving even further away from this principle, and I worry about that.

We in the Senate know that we are unequally — or some might say unfairly — represented. Ontario only has 24 seats; it should have something like 42, proportionally speaking, but it doesn’t. But that’s the Senate; the House of Commons is supposed to employ representation by population.

Are you worried that we are moving further away from the principle as we go forward in time? Thank you.

Senator Dawson: As I mentioned to your colleague, I totally agree. I think this issue should be looked into. One of the reasons there is a commission is so that we don’t get into political constraints of having parliamentarians from each province fundamentally wanting to defend their rights. But when we talk about grandfathering the Maritimes and Quebec, it means there is an inherent imbalance in the system.

That being said, there is certainly a lot of room to have a debate on the issue. Unfortunately, this is not the issue that is being debated here today. We do not interfere in the process of determination. What we are doing is determining that there is minimum representation, as we did many times in the past when we grandfathered Prince Edward Island with the four senators and when we grandfathered the Maritimes in 2010 or 2011.

This is a subject that deserves to be debated, but I think that is not the objective of the bill. One of the reasons they drafted it as simply as they could is that if we want to get into that debate, we all know that reform of Parliament will take a bit longer than reform of one more seat for Quebec.