Well, I go back to what I said about this being a colonial state, and constitutionality versus practicality. We accepted the British system 150 years ago. Is it the system that we should have accepted? No. Maybe at that time that was a good idea because we didn't know anything else, but now we know differently. We know this country is different from Britain, and it will require different solutions to provide the answers.
I would say there's going to have to be some head knocking here on this whole issue of mixed proportional representation, and we need to throw everything on the table if we want to understand how the system can work. It has to be done in an open fashion, so I applaud this committee.
As a committee, I would encourage you to take a look at solutions that work for Canada, because we're not going to do this again for a long time. If you do make a change to the electoral system, it's not going to be an ongoing change. It's going to be a chance to do something properly here. Whatever it requires to do that, let's do it.
There was talk about having indigenous voters vote for representatives across the country at one time. I know that was an NDP position, that we provide indigenous seats in the House of Commons, because we knew how important and how necessary it was for that group in our society to have better representation. Can we provide it in a good fashion through mixed proportional representation in the rules we lay out for the political parties, once you move out of how the political parties are bound by the Constitution when they create the lists of people who are going to be appointed once they go through the process of voting in the system?
The political parties are the ones that are going to actually decide who gets to sit in Parliament for the mixed proportional representation, so I don't think that part is constitutional.