Yes, Mr. Boda, and then Mr. Perrault.
It does not speak badly of the merits of either of these two excellent individuals to say that the process itself left Canada's electoral system in limbo for a long time. Now, because everything's been left to a very late hour, we have, once again, the same kind of last-second chaos that has prevailed in the electoral reform issue where the government spun its wheels for 18 months while I got up repeatedly to point out that time was running out, and certain models are going to become inaccessible to us, let alone consulting the people via a referendum.
For 18 months they spun their wheels and then said there was a mad panic until committee produced a result the government didn't like, and then suddenly, it wasn't a priority at all, and the Prime Minister announced that he'd been opposed to proportional representation from the very start, even though he'd had his minister steering the course of the proceedings: “The Prime Minister and I have no favourite model, and we're open to all possibilities.” At one point, following a meeting in Victoria, I think, she said she was starting to drift towards one model. That was all contradicted when the Prime Minister came out and said that, since before the election, he'd only ever believed that preferential balloting was an option.
Given the fact that preferential balloting is, compared to proportional representation, a very straightforward system, it doesn't require vast changes. It's not as if he was saying there were multiple versions of preferential to look at. There's really one and one only. There are actually two: optional preferential and mandatory preferential.