Through the chair again, Madam Chair, to answer your question specifically, the committee has never ever held a poll, but very early on in our work, which would have been probably about the third year of our work—we will be celebrating our 25th anniversary on August 13 of this year—Maclean's/Decima actually called us and asked if we would like to do a poll on how many people in Canada support a triple-E Senate. We said we would, and they said it would cost $100,000. We never had a budget that even gets close to $100,000, and nobody that works for the committee, except for a secretary, ever gets paid anything, so they said they would just include it with their regular poll.
And they've done it for many years. I think the first poll was right around 55%. That was Canada-wide. I think it was a Crop poll that gave us 79%. Mike Duffy, one week after the election of the current Prime Minister, did an informal poll on CTV and just asked the question, “Would you like to elect your senators, yes or no?” and it was 83.1%. We were flabbergasted. The last poll that took place in Calgary with Sun Media was 93%.
That's all I can tell you about what Canadians want, in terms of democracy. When you get into the details of how much power they want to have and everything else, I think that's why you need your provincial legislatures to gather for the purpose of a stand-alone amendment. They each need to discuss it the way they did in Charlottetown. I spent five days in the Pearson Building during Charlottetown, and we were discussing this issue with Premier Harcourt and his group, Premier Getty and his group, Premier Devine and his group, Premier Filmon and his group, and Premier Clyde Wells. We were amazed when we got Premier Rae, who was then premier of Ontario, to agree to equality. That was directly from a question of Premier Filmon. When Premier Rae said that Ontario had gotten into trouble giving away Senate seats with Peterson in Meech Lake, so they were not going to do that again, Premier Filmon, as I remember, said, that some pigs were more equal than others, and that's when we got equality.