The constitutional question is a somewhat complex one. I don't know how much time or interest there is for hearing all the details, but I will say that until the Supreme Court's Senate reference decision, it seemed pretty clear that Parliament could actually make electoral reform decisions or changes to election laws, provided it went through the normal parliamentary process. The court, in many of its cases, has said that the electoral system falls within the domain of Parliament.
The court has recognized a number of constitutional limits on what Parliament can do. These tend to centre around the right to vote, as protected by section 3 of the charter. There are also distributional requirements in section 51A of the Constitution Act. Apart from those types of restrictions, it would have seemed, before the Senate reference decision, that Parliament could bring about electoral reform.
As you know, in the Senate reference decision the court said that various proposals to reform the Senate did in fact amount to a constitutional amendment, even though they didn't actually envision any changes to the constitutional text. For example, concerning the consultative elections, the proposal was that these would take place without actually changing any of the language of the Constitution, but the court found nonetheless that this amounted to a constitutional amendment.
The point is that the question now is whether electoral reform it is the kind of amendment to the Constitution that would in fact require provincial consent according to the 7/50 rule, whereby seven provinces that have 50% or more of the population agree to the change.
What I did in the paper I was describing was try to figure out whether there's a way around this. Is there a way for a future court decision to say no, to say that in fact electoral reform does not need to be approved via a constitutional amendment involving provincial consent? In my opinion, there is an argument for that. There is also the argument on the other side that in fact a constitutional amendment involving provincial consent is required.
Did that answer the question?