Thank you, Chair.
I have just two things. I wanted to mention, on providing a subsidy to the official agents who complete Elections Canada training and file the returns, that this is a growing job. I'm so glad that you're starting to concentrate on that.
Tyler Crosby, behind me here, my staffer, was my campaign manager. For all intents and purposes, nobody worked harder than he did, hopefully with the exception of me. Nobody worked harder than he did. I have to tell you, for the chief financial officer after the campaign it is flat out, and no one sees it. It's a thankless job, and if you make a mistake, the seat is on the line. It's huge.
Richard MacKinnon is my guy now. We can't give him a subsidy, but I can give him a shout-out and tell him thanks. Every one of us has someone like that who gives a big part of their life, and quite frankly they have to be really competent, high-functioning people who get it. It's not child's play, so I'm really glad to see you moving on that one.
The last thing I wanted to mention was that notwithstanding the fact that we're seeing more and more evidence that referendums are not necessarily the magic elixir for every question in front of a democratic nation, we should at least have a referendum that works if we need it, but right now we are not in any kind of condition, really, to conduct a modern referendum.
A lot of work was done—and Mr. Reid, of course, was here then—during the minority governments. We spent a lot of time doing good work on referendums and on prorogation, for instance.
I just want to mention to colleagues that if we do start to look the Referendum Act, rather than reinvent the wheel, there's an awful lot of that good basic foundational work from constitutional experts and other people like Mr. Mayrand. It's there and available.
If anybody thinks right now that we can just pull a referendum off the shelf and have a state-of-the-art fair referendum process that works, that person is mistaken. I will just leave that with the committee.
Maybe we can hear your thoughts on how much work is needed for it to to be state of the art and to have something that would reflect the kind of referendum process we would like to have.