I will expand your question to include the consultation process. I find it absurd that after almost 30 meetings of this committee, we're only the second group made up exclusively of women. That shouldn't have happened. Your committee should have conducted a gender-based analysis at the start of the process.
From an outside perspective, it has been very frustrating to wait for you to be given expertise, because that's the goal of the consultation process. The committee has deprived itself of significant expertise. I'm not speaking only of the presence of women, but also of racialized people and aboriginal people.
Concerning validation, I'm not in favour of a referendum to validate the result of your work. We're trying to work on electoral legislation. Electoral legislation is legislation. Not all legislation must go through a referendum. Why is this legislation in greater need of going through a referendum? I can't find anything conclusive on that subject, especially when people would be asked a question on something they know nothing about and have not experienced. It seems to me like an attempt to wreck everything and maintain the status quo.
I'm not against reviewing, after three elections, whether we've made the right choices. It's different. At that point, we can talk about it again. We can then determine how to improve the situation. For the moment, it's legislation and you're responsible for submitting a report. I hope you will supplement the expertise that was not provided so it contains the analyses I talked to you about, not only my analysis, but other analyses on a larger scale.
I also think you're responsible for suggesting the next steps, not only in terms of validation, but also in terms of reflection. I certainly can't speak for the first nations. However, it would be worthwhile for the committee to show openness to holding discussions to see whether aboriginal people want mechanisms established to improve their representation. I developed mechanisms and others did as well. While doing so, we took into consideration that we couldn't speak on behalf of aboriginal people, but we could ensure that the mechanisms weren't detrimental and were transferable.
So it's important for the committee to raise the issue and establish that any claims made by aboriginal people as part of the current electoral reform should be taken into account. If no claim is made, the committee could still start looking at ways to reach out to the first nations.