We did a good deal of that, but you have to be careful about these rankings by the Centre for Law and Democracy and others that rank the most unexpected countries as numbers one, two, three, and four. For example, I have always felt that the constitution of Pakistan is one of the best organized federal constitutions I have ever read, but I really wouldn't want to be a federalist in Pakistan. What's written is one thing; what's practised is often something else.
The important thing is to look at the whole picture, which is what we did. In particular, we paid a great a deal of attention to the legislation in countries that had a similar historical and cultural background as Canada. That took us to some western European countries, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the United States. We looked at the practices there, and in Mexico, and two or three others. I forget all of them. We did a fairly broad examination of what was in the procedures in these other systems and took that into account and dealt with it, and we explained in the report how we dealt with it. That was certainly worth doing.
As Doug mentioned with the U.K. system, we took a good deal of guidance from what they were doing there. In the last decade or so, they have done a major refurbishing of their system, and we saw a lot of good points in it. Australia and New Zealand had made some major improvements, and we took some guidance from them as well.