SELECT COMMITTEE ON ELECTORAL BOUNDARIES
Hon. Michael Baker
MR. MICHEL SAMSON: If I am not mistaken, from what I read this morning, I don't know if it's this select committee or if it was the Electoral Boundaries Commission that was required to hold additional meetings.
MR. CHAIRMAN: The Electoral Boundaries Commission held, I think, a meeting in every county in Nova Scotia. I believe those were the terms of reference of the Electoral Boundaries Commission. I believe it met. I don't think this committee is bound - certainly, the resolution doesn't bind us to hold meetings anywhere in particular, or actually hold meetings at all, but I assume that we obviously are going to have to hold public hearings, so that was a given.
MR. BROOKE TAYLOR: Just for the record, Michel, in the minutes that were circulated by Gordon, on Page 2 it speaks to meetings and public hearings relative to the committee, not to be confused with the commission. I guess they held seven, or something like that. I think five probably would be a good starting point and would certainly give us an idea as to what folks out there think about this particular issue.
MR. MANNING MACDONALD: I don't have any problem with five venues, but I do have a problem with the timetable here. Are we looking at completing these five meetings, places, and getting feedback by the end of November?
MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes.
MR. MANNING MACDONALD: That presents a problem for me in terms of the House. The House is sitting in November and we have the highly unusual composition of this committee with four high-profile Cabinet Ministers on the committee. I suspect that if we're going to be travelling for the month of November, you've got one-third of the Cabinet out of the House on any particular day and that concerns me as a Party Leader for our Party and I am certain the same goes for the NDP. I can't speak for them, naturally. It concerns me that some consideration perhaps should be given to having members of your caucus substitute for some of these ministers on the road trips. It's not going to be acceptable that we have ministers out on Question Period days for the whole month of November, if that's the schedule.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I recognize the concern, and there will be some substitution. For example, you can imagine when the committee meets in Yarmouth, there may be a member from that general vicinity who could be doing some substitution. That's why the resolution - trying to be as flexible as possible.
MR. MANNING MACDONALD: Because you can appreciate that you have the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Education and the Minister of Justice as well as the Minister of Tourism at any given time out of the House, it concerns us.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes.
MR. HOWARD EPSTEIN: We do share the concern that has just been identified, of course. But I suppose it's possible to do something like this, to meet in Port Hawkesbury possibly the same day, if we had two different sessions. We might think about this, but the other part of it is that we have to be very careful in whatever advertising is done to make it clear that the public understands that this is not to discuss electoral boundaries but to discuss the mandate of the Electoral Boundaries Commission and, I suppose, as well the potential composition. Is that the idea?
MR. CHAIRMAN: That's right. My understanding, and I looked at the ads, and I don't think they're included in what you have, but the material that ran for the select committee ads last time was incredibly clear on what the purpose of - and I don't know if you've got the ads there - but I can assure you, Mr. Epstein, because I have reviewed the ads that were run last time, that they ran ads that I would describe as "crystal clear" on the issue of trying to make it clear what the public could come and talk about. In other words, there's no point for me to show up at this meeting, if I am a member of the public, and talk about the boundaries of the riding of Richmond, except I may want to talk about the principle behind which that riding is represented, which is part of the terms of reference issue. But it would not necessarily be appropriate for me to talk about the fact that Richmond should be bigger or smaller or whatever, that the line should be in another place. But, certainly the terms of reference, for example, with respect to the seat - and I just pick Richmond as an example - might affect those kinds of consideration by the commission.
So I think you're right though, the advertising has to be very clear because we don't want people coming in thinking this is their opportunity to talk about who their representative is in the Legislative Assembly.
MR. TAYLOR: Mr. Chairman, is it your understanding that the mandate of this committee would be essentially the same, perhaps with some minor adjustments, as the 1991 committee?
MR. CHAIRMAN: That's right.
MR. TAYLOR: To establish terms of reference for the commission?
MR. CHAIRMAN: That's exactly right. Obviously the outcome might be different because we can choose to vary the terms of reference if we decide to. But you're right, that's exactly the mandate; it is exactly the same, as I understand it, as the 1991.
To talk about dates because it seems, and I guess the question and I will ask the people who are here from Cape Breton Island to speak to this - I had originally been anticipating that the meetings would all be evening meetings. My experience has been that the public turnout at daytime meetings is not particularly auspicious; however, if people wanted to do the meetings on Cape Breton Island, it certainly could be done on the same day. Probably not afternoon and evening because there's the take-down and set-up and my experience with select committees is that it takes a fair amount of time to do the take-down and set-up. I am getting the nod from the booth there because it's recorded, the presentations, so the best you'd be able to do is a morning and an evening because you'd have to have the take-down after you've finished the morning and that's not very viable. Morning meetings, particularly, have low turnouts and if that were the case, we could do them back to back so that we could take advantage of the proximity of geography. I am just throwing this out; these are just suggestions. There's November 13th, which is a Tuesday, and November 14th, which
is a Wednesday; that is following a long weekend, November 12th being a holiday. I was suggesting that because we had four members of the committee from Cape Breton Island, if we were to do November 13th in Port Hawkesbury and November 14th in Sydney, for example, and I am not wed to that, that would allow the Cape Breton members to at least stay on the Island. It would keep travelling to a minimum.
HON. RODNEY MACDONALD: It might be better that we do the opposite, November 13th in Sydney and November 14th in Port Hawkesbury. That way you are travelling to Halifax. Is that easier on you guys? It would make no difference to me, somebody from Sydney might find it easier.
MR. CHAIRMAN: So just the suggestion at this point would be maybe November 13th in Sydney and November 14th in Port Hawkesbury. Again, in the spirit of not trying to take people out of the House too much, that might be it for that period of time and then the following week, November 19th, which of course is not a Question Period day at all, I was going to suggest we do Yarmouth. That is Monday. That is no problem. The only issues are issues of quorum and those are mainly government issues. Then Tuesday evening in Truro, that is November 20th and that is close to Halifax so that would allow everybody to attend Question Period. Then finally, Thursday, November 22nd in Halifax and, again, that would obviously not affect Question Period. I am trying to accommodate the concerns that Mr. Manning MacDonald raised. Does that sound reasonable?
MR. SAMSON: Are you proposing just evening meetings and no afternoon meetings at all?
MR. CHAIRMAN: That was my proposal. We can certainly do afternoon meetings if people think there is the demand for it because there is no more set-up or take-down for that. We can make ourselves available in the afternoon, as well, if anybody feels there is any point to it. I am just asking a question, really, here.
MR. SAMSON: I guess we want to be as accessible as we possibly can be as a committee and certainly I know, from my area, anyone who would want to travel to Port Hawkesbury, I know especially seniors, would probably be concerned about having to travel; 6:00 p.m. now is night time and we don't know what kind of weather we might be facing. So I think if we eliminate afternoon meetings, we might be cutting off a number of people who may have wanted to come before us, but don't want to travel at night time under questionable weather. So I would raise that concern that if we don't go with the afternoon, you might be closing the door to people who otherwise won't be able to attend.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I would certainly have no problem doing a 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. in the afternoon and then doing a 7:00 p.m. to 9:00ish in the evening if that would help address that concern. That is fine. As I said, this is trying to be as accessible as we can to people, within reason.
MR. TAYLOR: You mean on the same day?
MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes, the same day and the same place.
MR. TAYLOR: Okay, the same venue.
MR. CHAIRMAN: The same venue. So, for example, using Sydney as the first day, we would be in Sydney and we would have a 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. that afternoon, break for supper from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., resume at 7:00 p.m., say 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., and longer if necessary, but it may not be necessary. The theory that people who were available in the afternoon could come in the afternoon and those people who would rather have an evening, would still have the opportunity to do it in the evening.
MR. TAYLOR: You might want to consider having the afternoon session for one hour only, as a possible trial balloon, 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m, that is four hours at one venue. Looking at the submissions that were received in 1991, there weren't all that many. I am just thinking that we could avail ourselves in the afternoon, sure, but I think it might be a bit excessive. In my understanding, it wasn't done previously, but that is not to say we can't do it again.
MR. SAMSON: Oh, no. The last time the committee sat, they had afternoon meetings and evening meetings.
MR. TAYLOR: For two hours at each sitting?
MR. SAMSON: I don't remember the hours, but they clearly sat at two different times during the day, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, from what I remember reviewing this morning. In fact, at some of the locations, there were considerable amounts of representations. I remember in the South Shore area, the Meteghan and the Yarmouth meetings had a considerable amount of presentations. One had between 12 and 15 presentations.
[3:15 p.m.]
MR. TAYLOR: Maybe I misunderstood, Mr. Chairman, it speaks to 12 written briefs were received by the committee, many accompanied by oral presentations (Interruption) made to the committee (Interruptions)
MR. CHAIRMAN: Your point is taken. Why don't we try for Sydney and Port Hawkesbury because those are the ads that have to run most immediately, to try the four hours. The difficulty I'm going to have, the one problem we have is with the Truro meeting. If the Truro meeting runs 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., a Question Period is going to be engaged. That's the only one I'm concerned about. The one in Halifax is no problem because, frankly,
we can adjust the hours. We can talk with the Government House Leader about what his plans are for that Thursday and we'll simply make sure that the committee isn't meeting when Question Period is on.
MR. MANNING MACDONALD: Well, we would be in at 12:00 noon anyway, so Question Period would be over before 3:00 p.m. We don't have to travel when it's in Halifax.
MR. CHAIRMAN: That's right, yes. The only one that is problematic is the one in Truro really. That's the one that's problematic because Yarmouth is on a Monday again and that's not a problem. The one in Truro is going to be a problem unless one of the solutions might be to have the House go in earlier that day to allow us to be finished by 3:00 p.m. It may be adjustable that way. I think that's reasonable to try to talk about.
MR. MANNING MACDONALD: I think that is something for the Government House Leader.
MR. CHAIRMAN: We're all there in town so I guess there's no real harm in the extra couple of hours. We may have a very long supper if no one shows up, but if we do, then we're there for the people (Interruptions) On a more serious note, I have the advertisement from last time and I will read it because it is not very long, but I think it is pretty effective in demonstrating.
"The Nova Scotia House of Assembly, by a unanimous vote, has established a Select Committee to make recommendations to the House by June 14, 1991, or as soon thereafter as possible, respecting: 5(1) The composition of a Provincial Boundaries Commission on Electoral Redistribution; (2) Terms of reference for the Commission; (3) A timetable for the Commission to complete its report."
Those are the three issues they dealt with last time.
"It is not the Select Committee's function to determine the constituency boundaries for an electoral redistribution. That will be the task of the Electoral Boundaries Commission which will hold public hearings.
Any person or organization wishing to present views to the Select Committee on matters relating to the Committee's terms of reference as set out above, may forward written submissions to the Chairman or arrange through him to meet with the Committee.
Arthur R. Donahoe, MLA - Chairman."
MR. SAMSON: Just a question of procedure, I know that the commission last year had made provisions to allow for bilingual presentations to be made to it and I know that the chairman of the commission was bilingual. He was from down the French Shore. They had a secretary available who was also bilingual, but I don't know if the select committee had those provisions or not. I don't remember if I saw that or not and I am just curious.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I don't think select committees of the House have traditionally had any bilingual - we have two members on the committee who are bilingual, but I don't think there's any support. We're part of the House of Assembly and there's no formal support as part of the House of Assembly. Now, clearly, if you're talking about the terms of reference of the commission, that is obviously an issue that we can address under the issue of terms of reference.
MR. RODNEY MACDONALD: Mr. Chairman, just for clarity, I was wondering on the five locations, did we decide that we're just going to do the first two dates in the afternoon?
MR. CHAIRMAN: I think we're going to do them all in the afternoon because one thing we do need to do is run our ads. We're going to try to arrange to have instruction go out by tomorrow to the newspapers to start running advertisements because that's really one of the urgencies of getting notice out to people.
MR. TAYLOR: Mr. Chairman, do we have access to population rate of growth projections and things of that nature, you know, you may entertain presentations, submit information that may not be factual, but . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: I will make enquiries to determine what consensus-kind of material - and it may not be census data - which is growth rates, or depopulation rates, as the case may be, that might be available for the benefit of the committee. That's a reasonable suggestion. Is there any other information of that kind that the committee might want to have as background?
MR. TAYLOR: At present the variance is plus or minus 25 per cent. I think that's the same as municipal elections.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I think the variance is greater than that because you have the constituencies that are represented, constituency of interest today, and there are five of them, I believe, Preston, Argyle, Richmond, Clare and Victoria.
MR. HOWARD EPSTEIN: I believe the Electoral Boundaries Commission of a decade ago accepted a plus or minus of one-third.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Did they?
MR. EPSTEIN: They did, yes. That, in fact, leads to huge variations, of course, because something that is plus one-third is twice the size of something that is minus one-third.
MR. TAYLOR: HRM, I believe, is 25 per cent.
MR. CHAIRMAN: That is for the municipal variations. There have been huge population shifts in the province. I suspect, this is anecdotal, but I think we can all guess the difference in huge population shifts in this province, particularly to HRM in the last number of years.
MR. EPSTEIN: We are sort of jumping ahead, in a way.
MR. CHAIRMAN: We are talking about background information.
MR. EPSTEIN: The other thing you might want to note on that line is that in the Saskatchewan electoral boundaries case that went to the Supreme Court of Canada, they accepted as consonant with the Charter boundaries that were up or down 50 per cent, which seems to be very undesirable and very dubious, but they did accept it, when specified by Statute, but that is perhaps not what we are looking at.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I suppose the argument would be made that the process that we have here is specified by Statute. That is an interesting lawyers' argument, whether or not the process being specified by established Statute - and I am not speaking for or against 50 per cent either.
MR. RODNEY MACDONALD: Along with the census information the geographic size of ridings.
MR. CHAIRMAN: The geographic size of ridings. There is a Supreme Court of Canada case, which is the Saskatchewan reference, but there are also other cases since on issues dealing with that and that would be part of the material I hope to have available, the legal.
MR. EPSTEIN: Are you asking about the background information . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes.
MR. EPSTEIN: I am not sure if it is background, but it is a question I had when I compared the resolution that was adopted this year with the resolution that was adopted a decade ago. It may be that it is clear, but when in Section 6, the House was setting out, clearly for the guidance of a select committee, this committee, its support for certain things, it talked about 52 members and a commission that is broadly representative of the population of the province. When you compare that with some of the language that was used a decade
ago, at that time, although they talked about 52 members, there were specific references to the community of interest that might exist in the province at large and there were references to the Acadian and Black communities that were repeated a couple of times. That language was clearly dropped from the resolution that was adopted this time. I don't think there was any debate before the resolution was adopted, but I am wondering if you, Mr. Chairman, see any particular significance in this?
MR. CHAIRMAN: I think what happened is that there was Statute, my understanding is, in the previous situation, the Statute was amended as part of the process. The House of Assembly Act now speaks to a lot of those issues and I think it was the feeling that the Act itself spoke to those issues and, in fact, the wording, which I know was agreed to unanimously, included reference to the Black, Mi'kmaq and Acadian communities. It is in the resolution itself. I think it mentions it once.
MR. EPSTEIN: It was a decade ago.
MR. CHAIRMAN: The present resolution . . .
MR. SAMSON: I don't think it's . . .
MR. EPSTEIN: No, it isn't. It talks about a commission that is broadly representative of the population of the province without specifying. Now you are right that, of course, some of this has been taken care of in the sense that the Statute includes reference to discussions with the Mi'kmaq community to try to establish that seat. There is nothing else in it, however, I think that really goes beyond that. I just flagged this because it is an issue that undoubtedly will come up for discussion in front of us when people start to . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: There is no ulterior motive, I can assure you. It is simply a matter that we, as a committee, have to determine the terms of reference and that is what we are here about. There is nothing more to it than that. Dealing with preliminary issues, what we are going to try to do, if it will be helpful to members, is to arrange for pre-booking of rooms and those kinds of things and have them all billed back to the House of Assembly as opposed to - I think that was done with the select committee, Mr. Taylor mentioned to me, on the fire (Interruption)
MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes, something like that. Sometimes it is helpful just to have the rooms billed to the Speaker's Office. (Interruption) A practical kind of assistance that we can provide to members and, obviously, Hansard will be there. There are going to be arrangements through the Internal Economy Board for communications and legal support because, particularly, the communications support is most critical in the writing of the report phase because that's the point at which that assistance tends to be most valuable.
MR. SAMSON: Do we know who is the legal support?
MR. CHAIRMAN: No, that's TBA and the same with the communications. We don't know who yet.
MR. SAMSON: I don't want to belabour Howard's point, but am I to understand that what you're saying is that that language of those specific referents of cultural concerns has been taken out because it is now part of the Act and it is accepted, or this Act is still open for debate as part of our terms of reference, whether we want to include those particular groups of concern again this time? I'm not clear on that.
MR. CHAIRMAN: First, the language in the Act is not open for debate as far as I'm concerned. That language is in the Statute itself and that's part of the terms of reference that we operate under.
MR. EPSTEIN: I don't think that's right, but it's open to interpretation. I think the only thing that's in the Act, if you accept the Act as it is, as a starting point, the only thing that's specific in the Act right now is negotiations with the Mi'kmaq people over a special seat. There's nothing in the Act, I think, about Acadian population having particular representation, for example.
MR. SAMSON: Or even the African-Canadian community.
MR. EPSTEIN: That, too. That's right. That isn't in the legislation. It was part of the background of the last commission. In fact, it was written into the terms of reference for the equivalent of this committee at the time, that's right, and the hint clearly was that it was expected that something would be done about that and that was manifested in the electoral boundaries at the time. The fact that it is not in our terms of reference this time doesn't preclude us from coming to grips with it, by any means, but I don't think we could assume that it's not up for questioning. I guess that's the problem.
MR. CHAIRMAN: And I think it's clearly within the terms of our reference to deal with those issues.
MR. EPSTEIN: Absolutely.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Are there any other further procedural matters that we should talk about? Oh, yes, one thing I wanted to talk about was - and I don't intend to because these are public presentations - the length of time for presentations. I thought that might be one of the it is just for scheduling really. It has to do with the scheduling of presentations. I don't think we're going to be that jammed for time that we're going to be into the cut-off, but people should know whether it is 15 minutes or 20 minutes just because you don't want people sitting around, to take Mr. Samson's point, who may have come some distance and who may want to make their presentation and vamoose. Any suggestions on the length of time?
MR. EPSTEIN: Fifteen minutes with flexibility, I'd say.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Fifteen minutes with flexibility.
MR. TAYLOR: A variance of 10 seconds.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes, that's right, questions of 10 seconds would be better; no, no problem, 15 minutes with flexibility is fine with me. That allows us just to schedule. Any other issues I guess of process that anybody wants to - obviously, my understanding is, a select committee, that members are entitled to their per diems and all those kinds of things so those are just a matter of ordinary expense claims.
MR. TAYLOR: Just regarding procedure at the hearings, some people no doubt will make requests on behalf of organizations or individuals, et cetera. Now, if somebody shows up after the people have made their appointments to make presentation and, of course, those will be entertained too. Like is there a cut-off cut-off, and that's it.
MR. CHAIRMAN: No, my understanding is that the people who show up without an appointment go to the end of the pack, so that if you show up off the street - I don't have a problem with people making presentations who are there, but those people who aren't scheduled will avail themselves of the opportunity to schedule themselves. Obviously, they have to wait until people who made that appointment are completed. Does that seem reasonable? So if Mrs. Smith shows up I don't plan, unless given very strong direction by the committee, to tell Mrs. Smith to go away.
[3:30 p.m.]
MR. SAMSON: Are we accepting written submissions?
MR. CHAIRMAN: Absolutely.
MR. SAMSON: Up to what point?
MR. CHAIRMAN: That was the one thing I was going to talk about. Yes, thank you very much, Mr. Samson.
MR. SAMSON: Always looking out for your best interests here.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes. With friends like you, exactly, I know how I fit.
My suggestion would be that Friday, November 23rd would be the cut-off for receiving submissions, which would give us the following week to produce the report. We obviously
have to have deliberations and that gives us the following week because November 30th is a Friday, so that gives us all five days of that week.
MR. SAMSON: I take it the advertising will say "written submissions" and tell people where they can mail them?
MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes, the ads - as last time - were done before the advent of e-mail being popular, so both written and electronic submissions.
MR. SAMSON: How quickly are you going to get the advertising out?
MR. CHAIRMAN: We're hoping to start running ads tomorrow or Wednesday at the latest. There are some things that have been teed up a bit with Communications Nova Scotia now, but of course they couldn't run advertisements about places for meetings until you knew when the meetings were going to be held and where.
Anything else anyone can think of?
MR. SAMSON: I think it's safe to say we're not varying from the amount of meetings that we're having.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I never say never, but unless there was a huge turnout that we were not able to hear in one evening would we be going back, and I don't think that's going to happen. But, if, for example, the reason I say never is if you had a meeting being held in Yarmouth as an example and everybody who wanted to speak at Yarmouth couldn't speak that evening, not because they weren't available but because they just simply couldn't be accommodated within the time, then we'd obviously have to look at making sure people had an opportunity and I don't think that's going to be a problem frankly.
Okay? Unless there are other matters, we stand adjourned.
[The committee adjourned at 3:32 p.m.]
