Those are good questions.
The Prime Minister at the present time takes advice from who knows where when he makes appointments. We have no idea who advises him. We have no idea if he accepts or rejects the advice. It's an entirely internal process in the head of the Prime Minister. We look at the results. We applaud some and condemn others, and we have no idea what the process is.
I think it is inconceivable--and I can't underscore that more--that a Prime Minister would hold or cause elections to be held and then reject that advice. As a convention, this sinks so quickly into the Canadian set of expectations that the Prime Minister would be bound. One of the constitutional arguments made about this is that the Prime Minister would be bound. You can't have it both ways. The Prime Minister is either bound by an electoral process or not. I think for better or worse, the Prime Minister would be bound in this way.
So the prospect of an election--and I'll use that term advisedly--being held and then the Prime Minister ignoring the result of that to me is remote at the outset, and rapidly becomes inconceivable as the convention sets in. That doesn't concern me.
The back-door argument is certainly more troubling--about why the provinces are not being pulled into this at the outset. I guess there are two responses I would make to that.
If the Senate was functioning well and we did not run what I consider to be a very real risk of confrontation between an elected House and an appointed Senate because we have such partisan imbalances in the two, then I would say let's be as slow-moving about this as we want.
I don't think it is working well at the present time. The way to bring the provinces to the table is to start the process in some way. This is again where I think Bill C-20 catches your interest. If you tell the provincial governments we're not going to do anything on our own initiative and we're going to wait until they sort of rally around and come up with something, nothing is going to happen.