Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to turn to this referendum question again briefly because it seems as though we have a Liberal government that has a real aversion to the idea of asking the Canadian public what they think about the changes they want to make to our voting system. We saw it yesterday from the minister. She was clearly speaking with her personal opinion against the idea of a referendum. We're hearing it from members on the other side today, even to the point of mischaracterizing things to some degree, so I wanted to turn to it.
As I mentioned in my point of order, Mr. Chair, in the last federal referendum almost 72% of Canadian eligible voters voted. There were actually 13,725,966 eligible voters, and of that number 9,855,978 voted. Almost 10 million Canadians voted in that referendum.
What I fail to understand is how the Liberal government would suggest that there would be a way they could reach more than that number of voters through any other kind of consultation method they might be talking about. On these ideas of town halls, for example, if we were to have town hall meetings in each of the ridings in the country, to get the same number of people participating there would have to be 29,160 people showing up at each and every one of those town hall meetings. Alternatively, if you consider a more realistic number of people who might attend a town hall meeting, I think you might expect maybe 75 people. That would mean you'd have to have 131,413 town hall meetings to be able to reach the same number of people.
I would be more than happy to cede just a little bit of my time to any of the Liberal members on the other side if they could explain to me how they can potentially expect to consult with more Canadians than they would in a referendum. I'd be happy to cede my time to any of you if you'd like to answer that.