Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The chairman is quite right that I normally argue by means of analogy.
As Mr. Proulx no doubt knows, I'm the author of a couple of books on different aspects of Canadian public policy. In those books I tried to look for analogies from other jurisdictions where, both successfully and unsuccessfully, policies of a similar vein have been attempted. When I wrote my book on official languages policy, for example, I thought the model used in Finland for its official languages policy—the official languages there are Finnish and Swedish—was one that could be successfully used here to decide where minority language services ought to be offered. Of the available examples, I thought it was the best one. But I looked at many examples from other jurisdictions before arriving at that one.
I'm doing the same thing here--I am arguing by means of analogies. I'm trying to provide evidence that people vote on the basis of leaders and parties more frequently or in greater numbers than they do for individual candidates. I mentioned the example of the Paul Martin brand. This brand began to sour partway through the election, to the point where it was less of a selling point than the Liberal name, which historically had a very considerable selling power and loyalty. When the leader's brand, which had initially been calculated to be higher than the party's, dropped to the point where it was lower than the party's, some candidates—I remember seeing this on a Richard Mahoney sign—cut off the “your Paul Martin candidate” parts of their signs. Something similar occurred in the provincial election.