Steven Fletcher

Public record

Shrinking the Legislature: the Electoral Divisions Amendment Act

Issues & Impact

Steven Fletcher proposed cutting the Manitoba Legislature from 57 seats to 49, a smaller and cheaper assembly for a province of Manitoba's size. Like his other private member's bills, it did not pass, but it put a concrete number on a question most legislatures avoid asking about themselves.

The position

Manitoba elects 57 members to its Legislature for a population of roughly 1.4 million.1 Fletcher’s argument was that the province was over-represented and over-governed2, that fewer and larger constituencies would cost less while still representing Manitobans, and that a legislature should be willing to apply restraint to its own size before asking it of anyone else.2 It is the counterpart to his conflict-of-interest and election-financing bills: reforms a sitting member proposes to bind the institution he sits in.

The bill

Bill 203, The Electoral Divisions Amendment Act, would have struck out 57 electoral divisions and substituted 49, with the change taking effect at the first dissolution of the Legislature after the end of 2018.1 It did not pass.2 Cutting seats is a hard sell in any legislature, because it asks sitting members to vote some of their colleagues’ seats out of existence, and it runs into a real objection: in a province as large as Manitoba, fewer and bigger ridings can weaken representation in the north and the rural west, where distances are already vast and many communities are Indigenous. The bill’s value on the record is that it named a specific target, 49, rather than gesturing at smaller government in the abstract.1

Contribution, classified
Authorship Bill 203, The Electoral Divisions Amendment Act (2017), a private member’s bill to cut the Legislature from 57 seats to 49.
Advocacy Argued Manitoba was over-represented and that the assembly should apply restraint to its own size.
Influence A minority position; the bill drew no governing support and did not advance.
Result Not passed. The Legislature remains at 57 seats.
Legacy A concrete marker in the recurring debate over the size and cost of the province’s legislature.

Sources

  1. Manitoba, Bill 203, The Electoral Divisions Amendment Act, 41st Legislature, 2nd session (2017): reduces the Legislative Assembly from 57 electoral divisions to 49, effective at the first dissolution after 31 December 2018.
  2. Manitoba Legislative Assembly, bill status and Hansard.

These citations are as complete as the record now allows. More will be added as they are found, and these pages change as the facts do. Where a source is a recollection rather than a document, it is identified as such.