Well, you're right about that. Actually, when you say to yourself that it hasn't...I have always defended a referendum, and your comment gives me a chance to say something that I think is important.
In British Columbia, you're quite right that 57% voted in favour, so that was the majority. They were prevented by an artificial 60% threshold from getting their way. I disagree with artificially high thresholds, but additionally, the turnout in that referendum was over 60%. This nonsense that somehow people do not participate in referenda on electoral reform is just not true. Over 80% voted in the New Zealand referendum on changing to an MMP system from first past the post.
What I would notice and point out to everybody on this committee is that when a model has a very low percentage supporting it, such as the Ontario model in 2007, which only had about 35%, it also normally has a very low turnout. I think we can safely interpret many of the people who did not vote as saying, “I'm not even going to vote on this, because I'm so uncompelled by this model.” When people find the model compelling, not only do they vote in favour of it, but they also turn out in very large numbers to vote. I think that's a really important distinction to make, which I would like to have made to the minister yesterday.
I have one minute left, and I wanted to ask you this. You talked about avoiding redistribution by grouping a number of existing ridings together. That of course makes a significant degree of sense as a way of speeding things up. I want to ask the same question that my colleague asked Mr. Mayrand earlier. There is one particular community of interest that appears to have a right to have the retention of riding boundaries in a way that potentially can be used in litigation, and that is official language linguistic minorities.
In the case that arose in Acadie—Bathurst, a number of people, including the incumbent member of Parliament, said they found the change in boundaries to be unacceptable. I guess the concern I have is this: is it a danger that we could find an attempt to merge ridings subject to that kind of litigation, thereby slowing down the process?