Obviously, you are juggling a lot of different issues at the same time. I think there's one in particular that has an inescapable conclusion, and that's the subject of the referendum.
When we talk about a referendum, it's not just any old referendum. It has to be a fair and representative referendum. Otherwise, what's the point? The first conclusion that's inescapable on that subject is that it's impossible to have a fair and representative referendum before the reform.
You can see from previous reforms here in Canada and around the world that there can be reform. In the Brexit vote, for example, they managed to overcome the preference for the status quo, the strong power that the status quo holds, but the reasoning behind that was really xenophobia. It takes the wrong reasons to overcome the status quo power that systems have at the moment. You can say the same about the election in New Zealand. They were very resentful of the government at the time, and they voted for reform. Even in those two examples, the threshold was just met—51% or so.
There's no point in having any referendum at all before the reform. However, afterwards, it can make sense if there's a certain lapse of time that allows that status quo advantage to be nullified. One of the committee members mentioned that perhaps one or two election cycles should pass. I don't think that's enough. I would say at least one full economic cycle and perhaps, even after that, one more election cycle. That would give enough time so that the status quo becomes kind of a hazy question. The status quo after the reform: is it the 12 years or whatever number of years that we've been under the proportional representation system or is it the 150 years before that when we were under the first past the post system? At that point, it's possible to have a healthy and rational discussion about the benefits of each system.
This committee was constituted in order to foster engagement, national unity, and voter representation, and to eliminate cynicism, apathy, complacency... This is what a reform referendum does. That's another inescapable point: that we need to have a referendum if we want to validate anything that you do here, and that needs to be done after a certain time when the reform has been completed.