Thank you.
I think 30 days ought to be ample time. An issue that's going to go to the public in a referendum is already an issue that has some attention to it, so there will be some preconditioning of the public and the political mind around it.
Secondly, we're living in an age where communications in this country are overwhelmingly fast. I invite you to come with me back to Joe Ghiz's office when he--the father of the current premier--was premier on the Island, and he asked me to go. They were holding a plebiscite on the fixed-link crossing; that was the term for the bridge. They had a lot of time allowed for the campaign. It started in the fall. The voting was going to be on through the winter. Everybody had said everything they could possibly say for or against the fixed link in the first couple of days. Then they had to sort of comment on what somebody else had commented on, and on and on. Premier Ghiz said to me, “Patrick, thank God for Christmas and New Year's”--because they came in the middle of that and distracted people and gave them something else to talk about. That was before we were where we are today with our communications.
I think the biggest limit would simply be what Elections Canada requires to put in place, the mechanism for conducting the vote. Again, time is not required for the nomination of candidates, all of that sort of thing. A lot of what we're used to thinking about in terms of general election campaigns, getting the publicity out, is so much more streamlined for a referendum campaign. I think it would help us as a maturing democracy, a parliamentary democracy, to be able to have referenda questions referred in an efficient and expeditious manner.