Thank you, Chair.
Mr. Minister, building off what you were saying, it's not just that the Senate is undemocratic. In recent experience it's anti-democratic in that it's been undermining and stymying the democratic will of the other side of Parliament, the House of Commons.
If I could clarify one thing in the same vein as Mr. Hill, the province of Manitoba, my home province, is listed in research as favouring abolition, and I've heard Premier Gary Doer say that as well. But by the same token, we have just recently put together a legislative committee of the provincial government to explore our options for electing our provincial senators. I don't want it to be overstated that the province of Manitoba is uncooperative in this idea of incremental reform of the Senate.
Minister, I was one of the lucky ordinary Canadians chosen in the Charlottetown accord process, when they actually put an ad in The Globe and Mail and asked...I was an ordinary Canadian once; I still am. I simply wrote a letter to The Globe and Mail, to the Government of Canada that Joe Clark had set up. What I'm getting at is that it was a consultation that was a real engagement for Canadians. There were five--six in the end--conferences across the country where they brought in ordinary Canadians, some selected the way they selected me, others from civil society, first nations groups, labour, and business. We were really seized with the issue for months and months at a time.
So I wouldn't say there's no appetite on the part of the public for a broad consultation, because in that instance the country came out. They really did. They brought their best game and they got into it.
I firmly believe that the problem with the Charlottetown accord is that we tried to take on too much at once and it collapsed under its own weight. If the Charlottetown accord had been limited to what you're putting forward in Bill C-19 and Bill C-20, I think it would have passed. We were talking about the division of power and jurisdiction, shared jurisdictions, the distribution of seats, and the way we elected senators, all at once. People's heads exploded. It just became too much, until one guy raised one feather in the province of Manitoba and said no—oh, that was Meech Lake, wasn't it? I'm mixing up my constitutional reforms here.
But if I could, in the same vein the United States gets by with two senators from Rhode Island and two senators from New York, wildly different populations. So I don't think we should agonize too much about the equal side of it at this point in time. Ours is crazy. I believe New Brunswick has ten senators, if I'm not mistaken, and Prince Edward Island has four for a population of 150,000 people. I don't know how it got so out of whack.
But the 13 failed attempts, I think, are partly because we bit off too much. So maybe with these incremental stages there is some room for optimism that we can address all those irritants that make people cry out to abolish. Maybe they can be dealt with incrementally, so that hue and cry will settle down to the point where Canadians feel this is a problem we can solve if we solve it one step at a time.
I know that's more of a comment than a question, but is there any reaction you'd like to give?