Right. If you'll excuse me again, I apologize. In the committee's report, it stated that we should “meet a threshold of aggregated public opinion support six months (or at another time) prior to a scheduled general election”. You could have said six months, three months or picked a number so that it would be applied mechanically. You did not do so.
The next question I wanted to ask is this. With regard to the criteria that are being used, I note the criteria state that a party leader will be permitted to be in the debate if that party won 4% of the vote in a previous election, not “the” previous election but any previous election.
This is designed perfectly to ensure that the Green Party, which won 3.7% of the vote in 2015 and only 3.9% in 2011, gets to be grandfathered in forever because they won 6.7% of the vote in 2008. The Bloc Québécois will be grandfathered in forever because it won 4.6% of the vote in 2015, even if it's down to one MP. We're going to have a separatist party coming to every debate, including the English ones, forever, because of the fact that they historically won that percentage of the vote.
Why on earth did you pick that criteria, other than to win Ms. May's support so that you could pretend you had multi-partisan consent to this approach?