If there is to be any Senate reform, the provinces and Quebec must be consulted. Regardless of the changes made, I am convinced that for Quebec, it is an issue of some kind of counterbalance to its presence in the House of Commons.
Earlier on, I read what Mr. Harper was saying about the idea of turning the Senate into a House of the provinces. We clearly sense that the Harper government—and this was also the case with Mr. Van Loan when he came to testify—considers that Bills C-19 and C-20 are a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, in the sense that if they are not passed, they will work to abolish the Senate.
Do you believe that that kind of statement, which in my opinion is almost blackmail, holds water? Should we really be concerned that the federal government, the Conservative Party, could decide unilaterally to abolish the Senate? Is this a credible threat? This would forcibly result in a new round of constitutional negotiations.