I think that one of the answers is probably time. I think you're perfectly right. We've had minority governments in this country now for a period of six years, which is a blip, the blink of an eye, and I think it's perfectly natural for people who have been literally raised politically in a culture of majority governments to ask, when they achieve power: “What is there at my disposal here that can permit me to act as if I had a majority?” The power to prorogue is among the various things that you can....
But I think the genius of the Canadian people, if you'll allow that expression, is such that what they seem to want in this period in our political history, and we may come out of it, is more consensual government; government that makes comprises, a government that is forced, as it were, to listen to the other side.
I was attending a lecture back at my university. Probably everybody here will be unhappy to hear this. A number cruncher from the political science department was trying to evaluate the probability of either the Liberals or the Conservatives achieving majority status, given a certain number of assumptions, which are pretty robust, about that. It's a very low probability.
People who were elected for the first time three or four years ago are a new generation of politicians; it's not as if we have to wait 30 years. There's a generation of politicians coming up that I think is going to be coming with a different set of assumptions from the ones the actors who are presently at the top of the game have been coming in with. To a certain degree, this sort of thing—just a change in the circumstances in which people work and the fact that they won't be reaching back for the assumptions that were perfectly reasonable to hold through to the beginning of this millennium—will probably have more of an impact than any set of rules that we are able to come up with. Again, any set of rules can be gamed, no matter how cleverly they are designed, if people have as their primary intention to use them to their partisan benefit and turn a minority into a majority-like situation.
In answer to your question—and I know it's not probably satisfactory for a committee like this, which likely does want to come up with a sort of silver bullet answer to the question—I think time is probably something that will work in our favour in this respect, if indeed we are at the beginning of a medium- to long-term period in which minority government will be the norm rather than the exception. But I don't think this is a bad thing, because the changes that accrue over time because of changes in circumstances and changes in the culture of this House will probably be more robust. They will probably be bred in the bone deeper than if we try to do it through rules.
My students know that I rarely give a talk without making a hockey analogy. May I?