—which is a wonderful proposal, yet it has been rejected by the current government, I guess because it's 2016.
The question I put to you about mandate I think is important. The mandate of this committee, and I'll read from the House of Commons resolution, is “to identify and conduct a study [on] viable alternate voting systems to replace the first-past-the-post system”. We're not engaged in whether or not we should change the system; this is a “how” question. As you say, there are trade-offs with every system. As Mr. Dufresne has pointed out, as well as Professor Maskin, there are some advantages.
I guess to my question about improving the quality of Canada, to defend the status quo and say it's worked to this point is not a strong argument in this sense. We wouldn't have made any reforms to the way we vote in Canada if we simply relied on the idea that Canada's pretty good right now. Women wouldn't be voting and aboriginals wouldn't be voting, because Canada up to that point was working pretty well. There were those who at that time said—and I'm not suggesting you align yourself with this—that first nations people shouldn't have the vote because Canada is working out fine as it is, and before that women, and in between that Japanese Canadians.
I won't hold that argument as a reason to stay with the status quo. I take some of your other positions.
Mr. Broadbent was here yesterday and said a weakness of the 1980 Liberal government was that while they got about 23% to 24% of the vote in western Canada, they had virtually no representation, yet they were considering a dramatic change to energy policy, to oil and gas policy in particular. He invited Mr. Broadbent and some others from the west and from the NDP to come into cabinet—that didn't happen—and brought in a policy that was incoherent to western Canadians.
Is that a fair assessment of that moment in time?