It is the obvious analogy, Mr. Speaker. There is one distinction between the electoral reform promise that the government gave and the promise it gave here, which is that the electoral reform promise was dramatic in terms of timing.
The promise was that this would be the last first-past-the-post election. It was not clear what the government was going to replace it with. When we proposed on the electoral reform committee to give the government free rein to choose any system that it saw fit as long as it then introduced that system to the Canadian public in a referendum vote and as long as that system was five or less on the Gallagher index, which means highly proportional, it was at that point that the Prime Minister fessed up and said he was only ever willing to consider preferential voting.
That was good to learn. It would have been nice to have known that in 2015. I suspect that a number of ridings might have gone NDP but for the fact that some of their swing voters went Liberal. We might now have NDP members there had this promise been clarified at that time, as opposed to after the fact.
The member asked if the ship can be turned around. I would suggest that the House is doing the work of turning it around.
On the electoral reform issue, it is unfortunate that the whole shebang ground to a halt. Should it arise in the future, the nature of that debate will be very different as a result of the clarification that we collectively brought to that discussion.
Here too we see that a number of the items that were on the Liberal agenda, such as programming motions, which was the most devastatingly bad of all the ideas the Liberals had, are off the agenda. Here the idea was essentially to do what they were going to do on procedure and House affairs, which is shut down debate and make it impossible to move forward, but we have now come to a resolution. I think those are off the agenda. The governmentt House leader said in her letter that they are off the agenda, and on this one I take her at her word. That is progress, but it is unfortunate that we have to achieve progress in this way.
However, that is the idea of the Westminster system. The government's feet are actually held to the fire. It is not a very pleasant process for the government and it may not be a pretty process from the point of view of the Canadian public, but I am not sure we are after a system that is pretty. We are after a system that in the long run delivers incrementally better and better government, and on this matter, despite other philosophical differences between me and my colleague, we are 100% in accord.