The Public Hearings

The Act requires that 60 days’ notice be given of all public hearings and that only those who declare (in writing at least 7 days before the first hearing) an intention to participate will be heard. The Commission found the sixty-day notice requirement somewhat burdensome. It made rescheduling or adding a hearing difficult without unduly extending the time to complete its work, and it proved very difficult to book desired meeting rooms in some locales that far in advance. We would suggest that Parliament review this requirement with an eye to shortening it if possible.

In the event, 12 public hearings, with 136 presentations, were held as follows:

The majority of briefs presented to the Commission at the hearings were followed by oral presentations in an open forum format. In addition, the Commission received a number of briefs and written communications from individuals who did not choose to make a personal presentation at a hearing (70 by mail and fax, another 94 by e-mail, and several hundred apparent "form" letters). All were filed and read by the Commissioners. The Commission heard from many municipal politicians and officials, from a number of members of the House of Commons representing the province’s current 34 electoral districts, representatives of several of the political parties and a wide variety of interested citizens. While most presentations focused on a particular electoral district (or two), there were several very helpful submissions that presented broad overviews with plans covering much of the province.

With its several mountain ranges running north–south, and the uneven and shifting settlement patterns, creating manageable electoral districts is particularly difficult in British Columbia. By and large, presenters advocated preserving existing boundaries despite census data indicating populations well above or below the electoral quota. Most, however, recognized that some changes were inevitable and so provided the Commission with much information on the imperatives of local history and geography. The Commission was anxious to respond to the communities of interest that structure the work of members of the House of Commons in representing British Columbians but also to create a constituency framework that would facilitate the participation of citizens in the public and electoral organizations that animate our democracy.

The public hearings provided much valuable feedback, comments and suggestions. As a result, the Commission has substantially amended its preliminary Proposals. Whereas in the preliminary Proposals only two electoral districts had electoral quotas that deviated by more than 10 percent, in this final report that number has doubled to four as the Commission sought to accommodate the idiosyncratic imperatives of local community interest, geography and history. This desire for a more liberal use of intra-provincial variations was a theme raised at every public hearing. The Commission continually heard that British Columbia, with the country’s highest electoral quota, was unfairly under-represented, and in the face of much greater inter-provincial variations a slavish commitment to reducing variation within the province was inappropriate. Parenthetically, we might suggest that the continual reference to the unfairness of British Columbia’s representation in the House of Commons heard at the public hearings ought to be a matter of real concern to national parliamentarians.

The public hearings attracted a number of citizens who came to advocate the replacement of our current electoral system with some form of proportional representation. While these submissions were ruled out of order as beyond the mandate of the Commission, we recognize that those making them were sincere in their conviction that revising electoral districts in a single-member plurality electoral system does not adequately deal with the representational challenges of the Canadian electoral process.

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