I'm going to riff a bit off what Graham Fox said in terms of putting some stuff out there that people can react to. We did that in the New Brunswick commission. We had an options paper. We had some draft recommendations. We put things out to try to narrow the debate in terms of getting people to respond to specific things, to help us come to conclusions and decisions. I do commend that, whatever the equivalent would be for you folks to do something similar.
An example of the trade-offs would be proportionality, pure proportionality versus effective government. A pure PR system, designed willy-nilly, will lead you to issues of stability and the rest of it. There is an example of it. How far are people prepared to go? They will list these things as their values and they will want to have them reflected as much as possible. That's the dilemma—as much as possible. So it's two words: design matters. The design of your system, in terms of what kinds of outcomes it produces, will have a real impact on how much of one value or principle is reflected or not.
I think Canadians would be willing to let a committee like this, hearing from experts, help shape that, as long as they see that the core principles are in there. Since there is no ideal system, there is no best system. It is by definition going to be a choice of trade-offs, but the sooner you are able to put out to people something about your thinking, something about shaping the conversation in a way that allows you to get a better handle on it, the more productive your work will be.
The short answer is that there are lots of specifics you can do in there, but something along those lines would be useful.