That would certainly be our opinion. To begin with, we were very conscious of the way the Constitution is constructed and what is necessary if one wishes to change the method of selection. That requires an amendment to the Constitution, as you mentioned, with seven provinces representing 50% of the population agreeing to that. As we have seen in the past, multilateral, complex, comprehensive constitutional change with respect to the Senate has been impossible to achieve. Indeed, the confederation of the provinces studied this for several years and were unable to come to any conclusion themselves as to how they would proceed with Senate reform.
As you suggest, from a democratic reform perspective, this would be the next best thing, where you're working within the existing system with the powers that are currently provided to the Governor General to appoint senators and the prerogative of the Prime Minister to make recommendations to the Governor General. This bill certainly respects those parameters and was designed with that in mind.
There are a number of ways, as I mentioned earlier, and some of the flexibility that we've designed into this process is designed to reflect those constraints as well.
The Prime Minister decides whether to invoke the process in the first instance. There's no obligation on the Prime Minister to have a consultation. The Prime Minister decides for how many provinces a consultation will be held. The Prime Minister decides whether it will be with a federal general election or in conjunction with a provincial general election. There is no obligation on the Prime Minister that forces the Prime Minister to make a recommendation to the Governor General. The flexibility is left with respect to the Prime Minister to do that. All of those design parameters are to reflect the constraints we have in the Constitution.
So yes, very much so.
To comment on your earlier point, in terms of the simplicity of design, the complexities, as I mentioned earlier, are really for the administrators. In terms of the voters, I think everywhere the STV system has been deployed--Australia, the United Kingdom, in some of the emerging democracies, and in the former Soviet Union--there's been no instance of the voters having difficulty following the system.
It is important that the voters have confidence that the process is well designed and properly administered. I think we have some strong degree of favour here in that Canada has a very well-regarded electoral system and electoral process with Elections Canada. We're a leg up on many other jurisdictions, if you will. Voter education I think will be particularly important on this. And everywhere this system has been deployed for the first time, the focus of voter education has indeed been on the simplicity of the system from a voter's perspective rather than from an administrator's perspective.