To Shrink or Grow the Size of the Legislature

by Karl Kurtz

In Pennsylvania they say shrink the Legislature.  In Canada they say grow the Parliament.  I've written before in The Thicket about the dilemma of "What's the Right Size for the Legislature?".  Two news items in the last week highlight the differing values underlying some of the arguments on either side of the issue.

In an opinion column, "Bloated Legislature bungles budget," a title that is as ill-tempered as it is alliterative, Brian Wilson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writes: 

As I write late Friday afternoon, there still is no state budget. This is the seventh consecutive year that America's Largest Full-Time State Legislature has been unable to perform its principal task on time. It's more than three months overdue.

If nothing else, that is yet another argument to shrink the statehouse. Surely, it could not do its job with 201 members as easily as it can't do it with 253, and we'd save a fortune. Cutting the size of the Legislature by 20 percent -- or its cost by 20 percent -- could save as much as $60 million to $70 million a year.

In Canada the issue is not the cost of the Parliament but rather equal representation.  In an interesting article (complete with a PowerPoint presentation that illustrates a witticism that I read recently, "Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."), John Ibbotson of The Globe and Mail lays out how "Ottawa moves to reshape the House."  Like the U.S., Canada has a decennial census, but in our neighbor to the North no Supreme Court has ruled that there is a constitutional guarantee of one-person-one-vote that evens out legislative representation every 10 years.  But there are bills before the Parliament to remedy the problem.

In Canada, today, population growth is now almost exclusively confined to major cities in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta. But constitutional conventions and acts of Parliament over the years have entrenched protections for smaller and more rural provinces and for Quebec, creating a serious parliamentary skew.

If all ridings were equal, each would have about 108,000 people. But a Prince Edward Island riding typically has only 35,000 voters and a Saskatchewan riding 72,000, while Alberta ridings average 127,000 voters. It takes almost four Calgary votes to equal one PEI vote.

And the situation will only grow worse, because all the growth in Canada is occurring in those parts that are already most underrepresented.

Since stripping provinces of existing seats is legally and politically impossible, the only solution is to grow Parliament.

The solution that is being drafted by a minister for presentation to Parliament is to increase the size of the Parliament from 308 members to approximately 340.  Needless to say, there are all kinds of political ramifications.  There's debate as to whether the Conservatives or the Liberals will gain more, but one thing seems certain:

Expanding the size of the House of Commons would weaken the influence of Quebec's voice in Parliament and the Bloc [Québécois] along with it.

Not a word in the Canadian article about the (specious) argument about the cost of their legislature. 

Photo credit: The Canadian Press

Comments

[John Thacker]

"Like the U.S., Canada has a decennial census, but in our neighbor to the North no Supreme Court has ruled that there is a constitutional guarantee of one-person-one-vote that evens out legislative representation every 10 years. "

Actually, that's not entirely the problem. They have a guarantee of one-person-one-vote, but they *also* have a guarantee that no province can have fewer MPs than they have senators, and no province can have fewer MPs than they did in 1867 (or since in 1982).

Seats are apportioned according to one-person-one-vote out of a pool of 279 seats, and then all the provinces that would lose seats by that calculation-- which is everywhere but Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia (http://www.elections.ca/scripts/fedrep/federal_e/red/appendices_e.htm)-- gets extra grandfathered seats.

The result *guarantees* that the provinces that have lagged in population growth will be overrepresented.