The single transferrable vote system, and indeed most forms of proportional representation, if we were to go that way, work least well.... Pardon me. The smaller the constituency, the worse they work. If you have a single transferrable vote and you're only electing one member, you get basically the same outcome--not exactly, but similar.
One of the things that's unclear in Bill C-20, at least in my reading, is that it doesn't define what the appropriate collection of constituencies would be for the Senate election. It doesn't define, because we can't define it at this point, what the number of elected senators should be and whether they should be at one time or another. We're going to have a phase-in period where none of this is going to work terribly well.
The basic point is that if you want to ensure diversity of representation in the Senate and that we don't replicate the kinds of regional blocks we get in the House of Commons, then you need a reasonable number of people elected at the same time in the same constituency. Getting there in an incremental fashion is not straightforward. I don't think the electoral system proposed in Bill C-20 will work flawlessly from the get-go. It won't. But I think it will create the opportunity to begin to get this right.
I also want to note--and this really goes back to the question on a referendum--that our Constitution does not require that major constitutional changes be put to the people. It simply requires the consent of the provinces--either all, or seven. However, my guess is that the Charlottetown referendum has set more of a constitutional precedent than we realize. In fact now that we've put one major constitutional package before the people, I suspect that in the future, no matter what the constitutional change might be, if it's major and if it's significant, governments will be compelled to go back to some sort of popular consent. I think we've made a decision in the Charlottetown referendum that we will not go back on; I don't think we can go back on it.