I'll start by saying that I'd need a lot more than five minutes to explain the rationale behind that. It took us three or four meetings, times about three hours each, to get to that conclusion.
However, the rationale behind the structure that we ended up with was that we thought that would be the most engaging ballot structure that we could arrive at. If you look back to our mandate, it was to engage discussion out of the white paper, so that's the primary.... It pits our current option on equal footing against four different options. The four different options were related to principles that we had heard about. You start out with a handful of principles that would hopefully represent the different optimal desires that we had heard from the public throughout the course of the fall and then refined it over the winter, and they're each given equal opportunity. Regarding the ranking part of it, if your first is not number one, then you get to have a say in the second, third, fourth, and so on.
That was thought to be better, but I will say that there's no perfect answer to this. You could have a two-part ballot, which might ask: Do you want change, yes or no? Then you would rank your possible favourites for change. The problem with that kind of a ballot structure is that if you don't want change or if you're okay with the system, it's way easier to just say that you don't want change or to not vote at all and never have to consider the other four options. Then in a ballot where all five of them are there on equal footing and you know that one is only a little different from the next one.... The systems that are there are on a spectrum and that's on purpose. If you want a little bit of change, well there are options for a little bit of change. If you want quite a bit more change, there are options for quite a bit more change and you have the opportunity to rank on your order of preference one to the next.