Commentaire 2 – commentaires et rétroaction

Christopher Warren

Firstly, thank you in advance for your commitment to public service and willingness to put the time, effort, and thoughtful engagement needed to produce a report which would propose to redistribute Canada's federal ridings. Getting this right is essential to the health of our representative democracy, and the vitality of our communities. Thank you again for stepping up and demonstrating valued leadership.

As an Oakville resident, I would like to narrow the scope of my comments to the proposal's outlining of the 5 ridings in Halton Region, with the exception of those portions proposed to be included in a new Wellington-Halton riding, no concerns with that. I will start by outlining my concerns with the current proposal, and conclude with some alternative perspectives for your consideration.

Concerns:

• Parts of Burlington would be represented by 4 distinct ridings, parts of Oakville by 3 separate ridings, and parts of Milton by 2. This is a disjointed approach, inconsistent with the premise of maintaining community integrity in the distribution of ridings.
• Of practical concern, MPs for these ridings would be pulled in multiple directions simultaneously in terms of media markets, chambers of commerce, local community groups, mayors and council members, etc and would make the crucial job of representing our communities very challenging indeed given the constrained constituency office budgets and staffing resources, and the ever increasing demands on MPs' valuable time, attention and bandwidth to address local priorities in addition to government/opposition matters.

Alternatives for your consideration:

• Milton riding, carved out in a manner consistent with Guelph as a standalone urban riding in the centre of Halton region.
• Halton riding: consisting of Georgetown, and the rural parts of Burlington and Milton
• Burlington riding: consisting of the urban portions of Burlington West of Walkers Line
• Burloak riding: consisting of the urban portion of Burlington East of Walkers Line and the urban portions of Oakville West of Fourth Line or Dorval/Nassagaweya (depending on what is best based on your population modeling).
• Oakville riding consisting of the urban parts of Oakville East of Fourth Line or Dorval/Nassageweya (based on your modeling).

Rationale:

• This approach more consistently aligns with the premise of maintaining community integrity in representation
• is far more efficient in its approach to grouping MPs within more distinct areas, maximizing their bandwidth to address local issues by not stretching them across multiple municipalities, media markets, chambers of commerce, local community groups, etc simultaneously.

Thank you in advance for taking the time to consider my input, and I look forward to reading your final report. I would have liked to have participated in the hearing on Sept 28th but I am unfortunately away on that day.

Warmest regards,

Christopher Warren