I must confess that I am probably going to be the most partisan presenter today. I'm making these comments to the committee because you have both an enviable job and a disheartening one—enviable because of all the good that can happen, but disheartening because it's virtually impossible to be done in 10 or so weeks. It could be done in 10 years, maybe, but not before 2019, which is the next election. Plus, it's exciting. We get to contribute some ideas and maybe even have somebody listen to them.
One of the things I wanted to present, but I'm trying to cut it down as quickly as I can, is that part of our problem here today is we're looking at the wrong solution. The solution is abuse of parliamentary tradition, declining turnouts, continuous political advertising, vote splitting, etc.
My suggestion is—and that's really the gist of my paper that I presented—why don't we try to limit the power of the Prime Minister's Office incrementally, starting right now? I'm presenting this more to this side of the table than to that one.
Some of the things that you could do that would reverse some of these trends is to start by eliminating the omnibus legislation or at least modifying how the voting takes place for that, returning the per vote subsidies, having transparent financing and so on down the line, and then having advertising outside the writ period funded entirely by the party.
I have put this all in a paper, and it has been presented to the committee.