They came very close on the free trade legislation, the GST, and others.
In the back of my mind is the danger of us getting into that confrontation with the existing Senate, because we have such different partisan distributions in the two houses. So I think there are some real risks.
If I were king for a day, I would like to have a House of Commons elected on the basis of representation by population, and get rid of some of the distortions we have right now as we try to accommodate regional representation within the House. It gets awkward. I would like to have a tie-breaking mechanism that gives additional weight to the House of Commons, because I think it reflects the most crystal-clear expression of the democratic will of the people. You want to get that right.
It requires a change from the status quo. People assume now that the Senate doesn't have power and legitimacy. It doesn't have legitimacy, but it does have power. I'd like to strengthen the legitimacy of the Senate but constrain its power. I think that can be done. There are mechanisms for doing so. I don't shy away entirely from the notion of deadlocks, confrontations, and so on, because democratic government tends to be messy. It's not clear-cut, but we have to sort those things out.
I come back to the responsibilities of this committee, as I see them. The questions that have been asked today that I have confronted seem to be extraordinarily important and thoughtful ones. These are not trivial matters that have been raised by people. I would hate to see the discussions shut down at this point by the committee, rather than pushing us—Canadians, the government of the day, whoever—to begin addressing those questions in a thoughtful fashion.
How you do that as a matter of parliamentary procedure is something I don't know. But rather than slamming on the brakes, I would prefer to raise those hard questions and try to think through a mechanism by which they can be answered. Because they are important questions, and Canadians would feel you were negligent in your own responsibilities if you went ahead pell-mell, without raising those questions and thinking through a mechanism by which we might be able to answer them. All those answers won't be found in Bill C-20 itself.