I want to start with a brief comment and then turn to the citizens' assembly and the self-selection issue. That's all I can fit into five minutes.
The problem with the issue of rushing versus delaying.... The key point of view for us, as a committee, is that we actually have a mandate that tells us to design a system for 2019. That's what we have to work with, unless we say in our report that we are rejecting part of our mandate, that our mandate isn't practical. But as it stands, our mandate says we are to try to design a system for 2019. This involves all kinds of problems, one of which is by this time it would be literally impossible to have a citizens' assembly that is set up and makes recommendations, simply because it may very well make a recommendation that involves a redistribution and a redistribution takes 24 months. We don't have the time any more. We might have had time if we had started it a year ago, right after the election, but that's just a practical matter we're dealing with. I simply throw that out.
Having said that, I want to turn to the issue of a citizens' assembly and the very large numbers we are talking about. If we apply a very mechanistic version of the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly nationally—two members from each riding, one male, one female—you get 600-and-whatever members. The obvious way of cutting this in half—and I don't think this creates a problem that anybody would regard as unreasonable—is to say gender equity but every second riding has a male and every second riding has a female. Problem resolved.
I actually think you'd want to have some other equity considerations in there. I think it would be important to have a certain number of people who speak non-official languages as their first language, to deal with our very large and diverse immigrant population. Anyway, I'm simply throwing that out.
I do want to say something regarding self-selection. I think this is really important. We've had open-mike testimony which in no way reflects what poll results tell us about what Canadians think. At the open-mike session last night, I think it was about 5:1 people standing up and saying they were opposed to a referendum, please no referendum. Every poll I've seen indicates that no matter how the question is asked, somewhere from 55% to 73% of Canadians want a referendum, and those who were opposed, either strongly or mildly opposed to a referendum, amount to less than 20%; yet we find 5:1. This suggests a severe self-selection bias in who's coming here.
Having said that, I'll mention that I got up and walked around and counted the people in the room here, to make the point that in Canada's most diverse city, a city which I believe has just under or just over a 50% non-white population, out of 60 people in the audience—and I counted—five are not white, and the age demographic is also not typical of the age profile of the city. That's not to be disrespectful—with my board of directors in my riding association, there is a similar problem—but it is to say that we have a self-selection problem here that leads to witness testimony that doesn't work. Open-mike testimony simply does not reflect where non-activists on this issue stand. This will be a massive problem when we come to compile this stuff later on. We'll have a non-representative sample, a wildly non-representative sample.
Having said all of that, I actually want to go back to the citizens' assembly argument I raised earlier. What do you think of the idea of having a citizens' assembly that lowers the number by doing some kind of measure such as I suggested? Would that seem like a reasonable way of approaching things?
That is for you, Mr. Moscrop.