The cost of a trained seal

According to an article by the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) the Conservative government's proposal to add 30 new Members to Parliament (MPs) will cost over $15 million per year,  over $500,000 per Member. This is the marginal cost. According to The Hill Times,  it cost $561 million to run Parliament last year. However you crunch the numbers, that is a lot to pay for trained seals ( as Prime Minister Trudeau once called MPs) or a Sham (as the House of Commons was called in a recent MacLean's article ). MPs have become even more irrelevant since Trudeau's time, as successive Prime Ministers concentrated more and more power in the Prime Minister's Office. Party leaders have become more powerful and MPs have been reduced to being counters; in Ikanocracy terms,  physical representations of the voting shares of each political party in the House of Commons.

This is a lot of money to pay for counters. In an Ikanocracy, none of these MPs would be needed (and of course the Senate would go as well), and all that money saved could be either returned to the taxpayers, or spent on something worthwhile, like upgrades to our Education or Healthcare Systems.

Perhaps we could keep some of the money to turn Parliament into a Museum. We could even invite citizens with large voting shares to come to Ottawa periodically and perhaps again have some intelligent debate in those chambers.