The small step is that the Prime Minister will now, under Bill C-20, accept advice from the people of the provinces rather than from his own conscience, advisers, or whatever. To my mind, that's a very fundamental change.
The difficulty, and I think an area where this committee may well have an important role to play, is getting through a transition period. As I mentioned, I can think of electoral systems that would work very well for a lot of the concerns that have been expressed in this room, but in the short term it will be incomplete and messy.
Quebec, incidentally, poses a particular problem, and probably not in a bad way, because Senate constituencies are specifically defined in the Constitution, whereas they are not for the other provinces. Within Alberta you could have an election for all six Alberta senators at once, but it's not clear to me how this would take place within Quebec, with constitutionally defined senatorial districts. So for Quebec there is some hard work to be done.
Bill C-20 also provides an important olive branch to the provinces, in that it proposes, if I read it correctly, that the elections would be held either at the same time as a federal election or at the same time as a provincial election. There are supporters of the triple-E movement in my province who are very adamant that the elections should be held at the same time as provincial elections. Personally, I think that's the wrong way to go, but I can see us moving forward where we retain some of that distinction, where some of the elections are held nationally and some are held provincially.
As we work through how to make this sensible and sellable within Quebec, there are a series of design issues that I think offer some flexibility.
The last point.... I'm so hesitant to use terms like “back door” or “change by stealth” and so on, because it makes it seem illegitimate in some way. Yet I look at what has been a stalemate on Senate reform, with no movement, and I think there is an opportunity for some creativity here, some imagination, some ability to sort of get this discussion going.
I've been talking about Senate reform issues for 35 years as an academic, and I would like to think that before my death there will be some modest movement. I like to think that within my children's lifetime there would be some modest movement, but I'm not sure about this. If the Senate were working well, I wouldn't care, but I don't think it is working well, and therefore I do care.
I'm sorry, that's a long answer to your question.