Ontario Underrepresented in Bill C-22
An open letter to Hon. Stephane Dion, M.P.
copied to Hon. Peter Van Loan, M.P.
Forwarded Saturday, February 2, 2008 by email
From Alan Heisey
38 Avoca Avenue, LPH #6
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M4T 2B9
Home phone 416 923 5381
e mail
Sent from southern address
793 Willow Brook Drive, Unit 104,
Naples, FL U.S.A. 34108
Phone/fax 941 513 0444.
Mr. Dion, I write to ask you and the Liberal and New Democratic Members of the House of Commons to amend Bill C-22 when it comes before the House of Commons, rather than voting against it, or for it, as drafted.
I write as a lifelong Conservative party member and proponent of electoral equality before the law by meticulous contemporary attention to the shortcomings on that subject which have intruded into its observance across Canada and across Ontario.
I contrast what I view as the at-least recent, comparatively disappointing indifference of your party and its Ontario provincial counterpart’s attention to the seminal questions involved therein; to the long-evolving moves of the present national Conservative government to add needed Commons seats for the three under- represented provinces of British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario
The most notable recent examples of indifference were the McGuinty government adding a totally unjustifiable additional seat into the northern Ontario representation in the provincial legislature, followed by that government writing out of the terms of reference of its elaborate public study of “electoral reform” any reference to the core question of one person one vote, while invoking elaborate misdirection to the only-indirectly-related concepts of proportional representation!
Until the details of bill C-22 were announced I felt that the Conservative leadership on one person one vote, contrasted with the distractions set forward by the McGuinty government, were opening up a gigantic ideological gulf between the two major political parties of the country, which would redound to the benefit of Conservative candidates in the next national election.
Please understand my profound disappointment that the actual bill C-22, if passed unamended, would quite undercut any Conservative pretensions regarding one person one vote, the core fundamental of our political democracy, and short change the voters of Ontario profoundly, as you have recently pointed out.
To my unsophisticated perspective the justifications set out by Mr. Van Loan for the admitted Ontario shortfall are so arcane and obscure as to quite under cut any pretensions of “doing the right thing” on this issue.
I know that there are many Ontario and national Conservatives who share my views and we have made common cause to Mr. Van Loan to see the bill amended appropriately before being brought into the House, shortly, and then to committee before final votes.
You are reported as favouring the bill being rejected because of its shortcomings, but surely the answer is not to oppose the bill, but to correct the only recent, but greatly lamented indifference of the Conservative government to the representation rights of the people of Ontario.
This can be so easily done by amending the bill to redress the planned shortage in members of parliament for Ontario.
Such an opposition amendment would have to be supported by the Conservative government and the New Democrats and would provide a brilliant example of the whole institution of parliament doing “the right thing”, when the government of the day, - I hate to write it - for its quite incomprehensible reasons, cannot find the resolve to do it on its own!
i also think that the numerous cultural and regional communities of Ontario would be quick to recognize such leadership on your own part and reward you and your colleagues handsomely in the next election.
Cordially,
“hize”
