Thank you to our witnesses. You've come from Edmonton, and we've come from Vancouver, so I guess it is an open question who was more inconvenienced by the fact that we're meeting here.
I want to deal very directly with the question of referendum. I should tell you that, from the point of view of my party and of myself, there is no possibility of what we would regard as legitimacy without a referendum and, to be clear, a referendum before as opposed to after.
The reason for saying before as opposed to after is easily illustrated by a number of analogies. Would it have been more legitimate for Quebec to separate in 1995 and then hold a referendum after the fact to see if people approved? The Brexit referendum has been frequently criticized. People don't like referendums, but would it have been better for the United Kingdom to separate from the European Union and then find out whether voters liked it? The Charlottetown accord is something similar. We were all told that this was something that was really good for us, we needed it, and it was going to resolve our national unity crisis. But in the end, voters rejected it, and I think it would have been very wrong to impose that on Canadians without having consulted with them first.
I want you to just imagine the problem that arises here. Let's say we decide we'll have a referendum after the fact. We'll put into place MMP. I'm not being disrespectful of MMP; I think of all the alternatives it's the one that probably makes the most sense for a variety of reasons. But let's say we put the new system in place, have an election, then have a referendum, and it turns out the majority of people don't support the system after we've just used it. They've effectively said that this system, the system in which you've just elected a government, was illegitimate and that, to some degree, the government elected by it has a legitimacy that's tainted. To me this just invalidates the whole thing.
Someone actually said, “Why don't you have the referendum at the same time as the new election”? Can you imagine if you get your system rejected and get a new government? What do you do then? So holding off the referendum so we don't find out what people think for a year or two, I don't see how that improves it. This is just a terrible idea, and it's clearly just not legitimate once one thinks it through.
Having said that, I do think the idea of having a referendum, approving a system.... That's what they did in New Zealand. They had a referendum, adopted a new system that the voters had approved, and then held a referendum a little while later to see if they still approved it. It turned out that, of course, they reinforced the decision they'd made about a decade earlier; they thought the system was a good one. That, I think, makes some sense, and it does establish that, whether we adopt a new system now or change that system after the fact, people are sovereign. That would be the observation I'd make.
The comments that you both made about the need for public education and really thinking that process through are absolutely legitimate. It's been repeated over and over again, including by people who were involved in the process in British Columbia where, of course, they did get a majority in favour of changing the system and would have changed the system were it not for their undemocratic 60% threshold. That's my rant. Thank you for listening.
In the two minutes I have remaining, Professor Paradis, I want to address the one constitutional issue that I think is paramount and that does take a number of our options off the table unless we want to go through dealing with the 7/50 system, and this is the principle of proportionate representation that is baked into our Constitution and cannot be changed without some form of amendment.
As long as we come up with a system that does not change the number of seats in the House of Commons—which is doable either under STV or MMP—I can't see a constitutional problem. But if you were to change and say we're going to have a top-up of 15% per province, which is one of the numbers that's been tossed out, you'd have to have it 15% for every province, it seems to me, or else you'd run into a problem. That is not necessarily easy to do, especially with the small provinces.
Can I just get your comment on the concern I have there? Is it legitimate or not legitimate in your view?