Yes, through the Honourable Madam Chair, I do not have concerns at all, because I've been through the process once, in Charlottetown, and we didn't have seven provinces out of ten; we had ten out of ten. We even had the territorials--there were only two territorial governments at the time.
The reason I don't have a problem is because we're asking for a stand-alone constitutional amendment. There have been two of them in this country, that I know of. There may have been more. There was one in Newfoundland over the separation of churches, and there was one in Quebec for the separation of bilingualism. They were both stand-alone constitutional amendments. Nobody asked that they bring in Aunt Martha to the Constitution, from any province. They all signed; they all agreed.
We can give them a five- to eight-year timeframe for seeing this thing evolve, and say, “Okay, you have a deadline coming up here. We're not exactly sure what it is, but you probably don't want to have an elected Senate that has a majority if you haven't dealt with representation and the powers.”
That's why we look at this as a staircase, with this being the first step, and it's a warning.
The reason we don't worry about premiers—and this is not an insult to premiers, it's just a fact of life—is that we've been through 59 premiers in this country since we started Senate reform.