Mr. Mayrand has indicated that he had an hour-long conversation with the minister before last summer at some point. I know from my studies of five other countries that in a couple of them there are rules requiring that the head of the national election authority be consulted regarding the actual content of a draft bill. They have to operate election law. They have a distinctive type of wisdom that comes from being on the front lines of election administration, and the minister and the government need the benefit of that advice, as do Parliament and the parliamentary committee that's going to study it.
I know in other countries, and this happens in Manitoba, there's a device called the concordance. It shows the changes that are being proposed to the election act alongside the existing provisions, and it provides a rationale. When I first encountered the fair elections act, I was hard pressed to connect all the parts. It's a tremendously complicated and detailed document. There wasn't much assistance to parliamentarians or to ordinary citizens or to professors of political science to get their head around exactly what was being changed and how the different parts would interact with one another in practice.
The government could have done much more to help people understand what they were proposing to do and demonstrated that the three aims they set forth in the act were actually being supported by the changes that were being proposed.