I'm fundamentally a democrat, and I like the idea of involving the population on major questions of constitutional reform. We did it with Charlottetown. To my mind, it was a good thing. We didn't do it with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but polling data convinced some of the western premiers who were opposed to the charter to cave in.
But how do you bring people into this? Where do you bring in the popular vote? I would argue that it's premature. My reading of the public opinion polls is that people would say two things: one, democratic reform makes sense; and two, you're asking us to buy a pig in a poke, because we don't know where we're going. A probable response by the Canadian public would be that they like the idea generally but would want to see the details. We're not at that point yet. We haven't done the design work.
To my mind, the advantage of incrementalism is that it gets us going. The disadvantage to incrementalism is that we're not sure where we are going. In my view, to put the vote to Canadians without having some clear alternatives would be a mistake at this point.