Good evening!
When the story broke at the newsroom here at Raccoon Inc., an emergency meeting was called for the editorial board and our Ottawa bureau Chief...
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| That Blake. He never misses a beat. |
...was dispatched to really dig deeper into this issue and really get down to the real issues at play here. To begin, the story itself.
SPRINGTIME FOR HARPER
Canada's in a good position right now. On the large scale a lot of really great things are going on. In economic terms, the nation is a model. We've mostly dodged a lot of the hardships that have been hammering the economies of the rest of the world...
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| For example. |
...and the Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney, is widely considered to be one of if not the finest central banker in the world. The dollar is very strong right now and recently the Canadian average household income has surpassed the American. Demographically the nation is doing fine as well. If we're not already at then we're quickly approaching a population of 35,000,000. Immigration is doing well and the west is receiving a hell of a boom. All told, we're in very good shape.
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| Hey, I never said he was bad for the economy. |
So, as a result of our growing population and shift in demographics as the population migrates west to take advantage of the boom, it has been decided that there will be 30 new seats added to parliament and the electoral map will be redrawn to take into account these changes. These 30 new seats will bring the total number of seats in the House of Commons from 308 to 338.
My initial thought was "Yay us! Way to go, Canada!"
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| Party time! |
However, upon reflection, Raccoon Inc. has decided to rain on this parade. There is another story lurking behind this story. A story of...
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| Greed, sex and murder. |
Well...
Without the sex and murder...
That we know of, at least....
The investigation is still on-going.
PARLIAMENT BY THE NUMBERS
The current total of seats in the House is 308. Why 308? The constitution requires that there be a minimum of 295 electoral districts. On top of that there are "special clauses" that require additional seats to be added. Specifically there's a clause that no province shall have more Senators than Members of Parliament...
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| With the likely and laudable goal of limiting this horse... uh... play. |
Also there's another grandfather clause that states that each province must have as many MP's now as it had in 1985. Add it all up and it makes 308 and due to Canada's increase in population over the years, the number is being increased by another 30 to 338. The math is pretty straightforward and the increases will be mostly affecting British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and, of course, Québec.
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| Better luck next time. |
Now, here's what I want to do. Let's put aside the constitution and the "Senator" rule and the "Grandfather" rule and let's make this is plain as possible and ask on clear question:
Does Canada need 338 Members of Parliament?
DRAGON WARRIOR VS. DESTINY OF AN EMPEROR
This may seem completely off topic, but bear with me a moment as it illustrates my point perfectly. Let's compare...
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| A Slime draws near! |
...with...
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| Zhu Ge Liang is sleeping. Do you wake him up? |
Both are old school, 8 bit RPG's on the NES, and both are pretty good games. The purpose of my inclusion of them is the number of hit points each gives their characters, because in this regard they are totally opposite. Dragon Warrior starts out like this:
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| 12 Hit Points. |
Destiny of and Emperor starts out like this:
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| 100 Hit Points, minimum. |
Dragon Warrior ends like this:
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| End boss? 120 should be lots. The max if everything goes right? 195. |
Destiny of an Emperor ends like this:
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| 35,376... Huh. |
So, Dragon Warrior ends with fewer HP than Destiny of an Emperor begins with. In a video game, this is fine. Inflationary HP values are just fine. Whether you have 10 HP and they hit for 1 or if you have... 35,375 and they hit for 3,288, it doesn't really matter because at the end of the day it's evenly distributed and fair and it works.
Now fortunately none of these there's no consequence to these inflationary practices. It's not as if these "hit points" are "people" that you have to pay "salaries" to.
HIT POINTS AS PEOPLE
Uh oh.
WITH SALARIES
Crap.
But before I get too deeply into this I'd like to present another comparison.
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| The United States House of Representatives |
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| The Canadian House of Commons |
Oh crap. Accidentally got an old picture in there from a previous entry it seems. I'll, uh, remedy that later in editing. Maybe.
At any rate, this is what I would like to impress upon you. In general terms, the purpose of the House of Representatives and the House of Commons serve comparable functions and perform comparable duties, so let's put them side by side and see what happens. And, to be sure, let's use the 338 figure for the House of Commons.
Total Members in the House of Representatives: 435
Total Members in the House of Commons: 338
Population of the United States: 314,291,832
Population of Canada: 34,907,354
(Populations obtained by official census population clocks)
Annual Representative's Salary: $174,000.00
Annual Member of Parliament: $157,731.00
Amount of money each American pays for their Representatives salary annually: $0.24
Amount of money each Canadian pays for their MP's salary annually: $1.53
In other words, for doing the same job as their American counterparts, we pay our MP's over six times as much as their American counterparts. Nice.
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| I have this unexplainable, yet overwhelming urge to throw up a picture of David Dingwall... |
CONTEXT
Well, maybe if we take a look at the big picture we'll find that what we have in Canada is comparable to other nations and that America's 24 cents is just a miserly, small government nation acting as one would expect them to act. I'll adjust all figures into Canadian dollars for the sake of comparison.
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| $1.02 |
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| $0.92 |
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| $1.28 |
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| $2.99 |
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| $3.20 |
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| $1.37 |
As you can see, the load that a Canadian bears to pay for their parliamentarian's salary is above the median when compared to other nations. The reason for our load being this high is not, shockingly, because our politicians are being paid too much. In the grand scheme of things a Canadian MP gets paid just about what I would expect a Canadian parliamentarian to get paid and they make a salary comparable to other nations' compensations for their parliamentarians. No, the problem is not that they are being paid too much, but rather that there are too many of them.
Listed below is the average number of citizens each nation has that is served by one member of their respective parliament, house of representatives, or whatever.
United States: 722,506
Japan: 266,285
Australia: 150,804
France: 113,408
Canada: 103,276
United Kingdom: 96,371
New Zealand: 36,710
Finland: 26,935
If one was of the mindset that taxpayers money should be respected...
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| Yes... "Mind"set. We'll go along with that. |
...then we could conclude that the people of New Zealand and Finland are getting hosed. However, I almost have to ask the question: is Parliament like high school? Not in, like a maturity level because...
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| Debate on Bill C-38 or Lunchtime in cafeteria? Too close to tell. |
...but rather does it follow the idea that a smaller classroom size makes for better explanation, better student participation, and more accessible help? Is there any correlation between the number of citizens per MP and good, responsible government? Is the fact that the United States only has one Representative for every 722,506 citizens at least partly to blame for situations such as...
It's an interesting question. Does under-representation lead to bad government?
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| The Editorial Board of Raccoon Inc. is unwilling to believe it either, Dear Leader! |
Well, if your representation is one (1) person, as in an autocracy, I find it very difficult to argue that your would get good government. "Benevolent Dictatorship" is not a plausibility for me as much as it is a contradiction. I would say that under-representation does lead to bad government. At the very least I would think that it leads to apathy. Put another way, would it be easier to get three random people to decide on set of four toppings for their pizza or fifty likewise random people? With fifty you'd be lucky to get anything beyond crust, sauce, maybe cheese, maybe pepperoni. The more people you have to speak for the more the message will inevitably get watered down.
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| For example. |
CONCLUSION
In the end, is there a right answer about whether Canada gets good value or not from what they pay for their Parliamentarians? Is the move to create an extra thirty seats really necessary? I don't know for sure if there's a real right or wrong answer to this. Essentially it all boils down to this:
- We need the extra thirty seats to ensure that a reasonable number of Canadians can have their voices easily heard.
- We don't need this because the load of how much each Canadian pays per parliamentarian is already...
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| ...too damn high. |
- We need the extra thirty seats because a smaller number of constituents makes it easier for MP's to put forward a clear and distinct message about what it is that they want from their government.
- We don't need this because with the current parliamentary system so much of this individualistic power in the individual MP's is rendered irrelevant when set against the power of the PMO and the Party Whip.
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| For example. |
In the end, what does it mean? Is it just more money for more friends of the party elite, further fleshing out an already over-compensatory system? Or is it an assurance that there are enough MP's in place to meet the representational needs of our growing population? You be the judge. And thank you for reading.
