The definition of exceptional circumstances is not a simple one, and I would have liked to see some attempt in the drafting of the law. My ideal would be something like the German system, where in a majority system you'd still need a vote of non-confidence. This would mean the government would have to engineer a vote of non-confidence from its own members, which would take really extraordinary circumstances for it to act. In other words, the idea would be that when the government loses the confidence of the House, only then can we have a premature election, whether in a majority or a minority situation.
The second point I want to make is particularly in relation to Mr. Massicotte's interpretation. This is all a matter of interpretation. You can interpret the law as an incentive that will make it harder for the Prime Minister in a majority situation to call a premature election, but we don't really know. Nothing in this law is going to tell us whether this will happen. I'd like to believe this will happen. Minimally, I would like to see a very clear statement accompanying the law that would say that give Canadians a message saying this is what we expect. It seems to me that's the very least we could expect, and it would be publicized in a very clear way. Perhaps it could still happen; I'm not ruling it out.
I would go further, possibly, if the consensus is that all this does is reduce the five-year term, make it a bit shorter, and that ultimately the room to manoeuvre of a majority Prime Minister really hasn't changed very much. I suggest--and if we want to avoid a constitutional issue--we could go further and do what they do here in this country, in Sweden, and in Finland, and that is that we would change the incentives. It's a very simple process. The next election would simply take place on the third Monday in October after the last regular election, so a premature election would not change that. That would have a very strong disincentive to anybody bringing down a government prematurely. That's an extreme measure, and I'd hope we could avoid that, but I wouldn't want to end up with the status quo, except a slightly shorter length of Parliament.