Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Topp, for being here. I read your book with great interest and wanted to take the opportunity to congratulate you on it. It is very well written. As a former historian, I appreciate your extreme precision in what you write there, a position obviously aided by the fact that you were clearly using a BlackBerry in your conversation. If anybody gets a chance to read it, they'll discover that it is full of references to “at 6:15, I got this e-mail, and I responded at 6:17”, and that kind of thing.
But it is very well done. I only wish that someone with your same eye for precision had been present at the Confederation debates and had kept notes as careful as the ones you kept.
I want to deal with something that I think is important here. I'm also glad, by the way, that of the two prorogations in the past years, you're talking about the constitutionally significant one.
It seems to me that what you are doing in your presentation this morning is dealing with this using constitutional language, but you're actually in spirit working at a more elevated level, asking about what is right in our constitutional evolution since Runnymede. If one looks at it that way, one isn't confronted with a struggle between Parliament and the crown as much as, I would say, one is looking at a central issue, that ultimately the people ought to give the mandate to govern, whatever the constitutional framework is that we put that in.
The obvious problem I'm faced with when I look at what took place as the coalition was being prepared is that the people, polls indicate, were not supportive of a coalition government.
So while I think you probably could achieve, using the mechanisms you've laid out, a situation in which it would be possible to execute the proposal you're advocating—and if that were done, I suspect that, in the future, people would be fully aware of what's going on and would vote accordingly—in 2008, only one of the party leaders, your own party leader, Mr. Layton, was forthright in saying during the course of the election, “I'm prepared to work in a coalition”.
Mr. Dion was not. In fact, he overtly rejected the notion, and I think that reflects why the polls were so strongly against this proposal. It simply hadn't been considered and was not one of the options that voters regarded as being on the table.
I wonder how you deal with that kind of problem of legitimacy as it existed in 2008. I grant that in a future election, if the mechanisms you proposed have been taken into account, people would very likely go into the polls fully aware that a coalition was a likely outcome and bearing that in their decision-making.