Madam Speaker, I listened with great interest to the very intelligent minister on this issue, but when this issue of abolishing the Senate is raised, the complaint that I hear from over there is that it would involve constitutional change. How can we do what the member suggests without getting into that quagmire?
We have Alberta with six Senate seats compared to 10 in New Brunswick. The whole thing is a mess. To even try to get any sense of it would require the most agonizing amount of constitutional bargaining, disagreement, and unhappiness that one could imagine.
The simplest thing to do, what the minister's leader said to do, is to abolish the thing. I do not think it can be fixed.