Adding seats to the Blue Room is not a solution to the electoral redistribution proposed by Élections Québec, believes the Minister responsible for Democratic Institutions, Jean-François Roberge.
“It’s not in our plans,” the elected representative of the Coalition Avenir Québec simply said on Wednesday, when asked about the possibility of reopening the Electoral Act to add constituencies in the province. Since Tuesday, several Gaspé elected officials — including some of his colleagues — have taken to the barricades to denounce the Electoral Representation Commission’s project to reorganize Quebec constituencies.
If this proposal went forward, Montreal and Gaspésie would each lose a riding, to the benefit of the Laurentians and Centre-du-Québec. “On its face, the proposal that is submitted is worrying for the citizens of Gaspésie,” said the minister responsible for the region, Maïtée Blanchette Vézina.
With her CAQ colleagues from Gaspésie, deputies Stéphane Sainte-Croix and Catherine Blouin, she intends to plead for the same exceptions that the region obtained during the last electoral reorganization, in 2017. Gaspé and Bonaventure, which Élections Québec proposes to merge, have respectively 40% and 30% fewer voters than the national average per constituency. The law does not technically allow going below 25%.
“We are going to make the same request [d’exceptions] “, said M.me Blanchette Vézina.
Tuesday evening, the former PQ candidate in the Bonaventure riding Alexis Deschênes urged the government to reopen the Electoral Act to increase the number of deputies and maintain the political weight of Gaspésie. After renovation, the Blue Room will indeed have four more seats.
However, such a project will not come true, if we trust Prime Minister François Legault. “We have 125 counties in Quebec, the same number as in Ontario, for a population that is much smaller,” he argued from New York on Wednesday, where he is participating in the Climate Ambition Summit.
Changes to the law
In the context, the Parti Québécois is calling for changes to the current law to add certain criteria such as natural belonging to a region and the issue of the boundaries of administrative regions. In a press scrum Wednesday morning, the member for Matane-Matapédia, Pascal Bérubé, affirmed that the size of the constituencies in Gaspésie would become disproportionate and that they would become impossible for an elected official to cover. Consequence: citizens would not have equal access to their MP on Quebec territory.
If he recognized that it was important to “protect as much as possible” the Gaspésie and the East of Montreal, François Legault replied that a reflection on the size of the constituencies was necessary. “Currently, if we look at the county of Éric Lefebvre [Arthabaska, dans le Centre-du-Québec], that’s where there are more voters. At some point, voters also need the weight of their vote to be comparable from one region to another,” he indicated.
With The Canadian Press