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Federal Heritage Minister James Moore needs a lesson in Canadian heritage when it comes to the question of whether Quebec deserves more House of Commons seats, NDP deputy leader Thomas Mulcair said Monday. Mulcair, who is contemplating a run for the party's leadership, said B.C.'s senior cabinet minister is wrong to accuse the official Opposition of "pandering" to Quebec because it has 59 seats in the province. Moore levelled the charge last week when he blasted the NDP for insisting that Quebec, as well as fast-growing B.C, Alberta and Ontario, deserves more seats when electoral boundaries are next redistributed based on the 2011 census. The goal of the bill should be fairness and not "about the immediate politics of pandering to one group of Canadians instead of another because that's where 59 of your MPs happen to be from," air yeezy Moore said. But Mulcair cited a 1991 Supreme Court of Canada decision involving electoral boundaries in Saskatchewan that declared that boundary makers can deviate from "absolute voter parity" when they are considering community and minority interests. "Mr. Moore is showing a singular lack of understanding of Canadian institutions," Mulcair, a lawyer and former university professor, said. Mulcair maintains that Parliament needs to give meaning to the 2006 House of Commons all-party declaration, made after Stephen Harper became prime minister, declaring that the Quebec people "form a nation within a united Canada." "You could ask James Moore, since he is in charge of heritage, what part of Canadian heritage doesn't he understand?" Mulcair said. "Does he not understand that of all the communities of interest that exist, that one that has to be protected is the one that he's recognized constitutes a nation within Canada, when he voted for that recognition?" Government House leader Peter Van Loan on Monday said one of the government's autumn priorities is to introduce legislation to create an electoral boundary redistribution formula that would better reflect population growth. A previous attempt to bring in such legislation proposed a formula that would have expanded the 308-seat chamber by 30 seats, giving 18 to Ontario, seven to B.C. and five to Alberta. Under that scenario Quebec, which now has 24.4 per cent of the seats and a little more than 23 per cent of the population, would see its share of Canadian MPs decline to just slightly more than 22 per cent. The NDP has argued that Quebec should be guaranteed to maintain its current share of the seats. That would require the 338-seat Commons to be swollen further by boosting Quebec's allotment to 82 or 83 seats, from the current 75. Earlier Monday, Mulcair told reporters that such a move is consistent with the 2006 "nation" motion and the 1991 Supreme Court of Canada decision. "It would be an irony to say that Quebec constitutes — the Quebecois constitute — a nation within Canada and then the first thing you do is you reduce the . . . weight of Quebecers within the House of Commons." The 1991 court decision weighed arguments for and against the principle that all voters should be treated equally. "Relative parity of voting power is a prime condition of effective representation," the majority of judges concluded. "Deviations from absolute voter parity, however, may be justified on the grounds of practical impossibility or the provision of more effective representation. Factors like geography, community history, community interests and minority representation may need to be taken into account to ensure that our legislative assemblies effectively represent the diversity of our social mosaic. "Beyond this, dilution of one citizen's vote, as compared with another's, should not be countenanced."