Well, Mr. Reid, I think this question is one of the most important ones the committee will grapple with, and that is the question, because that's the heart of the referendum.
In my books, I say that not all issues--a lot of economic and social policy questions--are ones that can be easily reduced to yes or no answers. However, you will be voting in the House this week, and all of you will be voting. We've had votes that always come down to.... No matter how complex the issue, somebody has to make a decision. Do the troops stay in Afghanistan, yes or no? Do we have a trade treaty with the Americans, yes or no? Do we continue to build the program for nuclear powered submarines, yes or no? On and on, with all the complexity that's there....
Ultimately, whoever is sitting around the cabinet table, whoever is voting in the House, or whoever is Prime Minister, has to decide: we're going to do it or we're not going to do it. That's an important thing to bear in mind.
It's just like how you have to focus your attention to give a 45-second statement in the House. You sometimes have to really get the ballot question precise. In one of the referendums in Quebec, the wording of the question was over 100 words long. This is not a way of making it clear to Canadians.
I think it's very important, if I could submit this to you. You really want to address section 5 of this present act, which deals with the question and the vote on it by Parliament. It goes on for a page and a half. It's all about details and technical things behind the scenes. If section 5 were describing the inner workings of a clock, great, but there are no hands out there telling the time.
What needs to be said is a form of the question. Many statutes do that: “Are you in favour of such-and-such, yes or no?” The British vote on the Common Market was as simple as that. And all these big questions....
So I think it's important that a lot of attention be paid, not to, as section 5 currently does, the back of the rules of procedure on how the vote's going to come about and what's going to trigger this, but to the wording and the process for it.
I'll just end with this. I submit that this is where it's very important that parliamentarians really grab hold of this idea that although the term “direct democracy” has been in our political culture since a century now, what we're really talking about is semi-direct democracy. Although the citizens are voting on a ballot question, first of all it is parliamentarians who have enacted the law and set the legal framework under which the process takes place. Secondly, it's parliamentarians who have debated and enacted the ballot question. Third, if the measure carries and people say, “Yes, we want that to happen”, then it doesn't just happen; it falls to parliamentarians to implement it, to debate the legislation, and to enact it. This really is the highest partnership that citizens and their elected representatives could have, and this is why this system is not alien to a parliamentary democracy, but rather an integral part of it.