Just breathe deeply.
It's okay, Dave. You still won your seat. It's all right.
It really matters. When the Chief Electoral Officer came in there was no partisanship to it at all. Why? Because the Chief Electoral Officer hopefully, and blessedly for us, is completely 100% honest, has not a biased bone in his body, and his goal is to give us, as participants and Canadian citizens who own it, an election process that, as much as first past the post allows, reflects the political will of the nation. That's important stuff. It doesn't get much bigger. It's deciding who gets to run a G7 country with the second-highest oil reserves in the world to boot. This matters. We took it that way, and we did report in a timely manner and structured our work in a way that was timely. I'm not going to get any benefit out of it except maybe an improved electoral process. The government's the one that's going to get the credit, quite frankly, because it's the one that's going to take the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations, which find themselves as part of our report. It's going to take that report and form legislation, and it's going to come in and say, look how wonderful we are. We're doing all this great stuff. And we're going to have to sit there and say, yes, a lot of that is my work and you're getting the credit for it. But, do you know what? That's just the way it goes. That in no way negates or lessens the responsibility I feel to be respectful of colleagues who are approaching this important matter in exactly the same way.
The first thing we said was that we were going to do this in a timely manner, out of respect for, quite frankly, Canadians. In the same paragraph, the next sentence reads: “The Committee, therefore, considers this report to be an interim report.”
So again, to Mr. Badawey, where we were able to find agreement as quickly as possible or with a focused discussion and wordsmithing and approaches, then we were able to bring in this report. We're recognizing that we still have more work to do and some of the tougher stuff is still coming, but we're trying to do the best we can. We want to move this as quickly as we can, and we want these things to form part of the rules for the next election. The best way we can do that is to get our report in the hands of the minister responsible so that she can then formulate legislation, get it to cabinet, get it in front of the House, and make the changes so the next election is even fairer and better than the one we just had. That's the process.
We considered this, and still do an interim report. In preparing its interim report, the committee.... Remember, this is unanimous. The government members, the very same members, most of whom are here now, at different times.... In other words, they were members of the committee then; they're members of the committee now, even though they may or may not be present at this exact moment. They were members of the committee then and they are members now. We collectively said, “the Committee placed a priority on striving to achieve consensus among viewpoints; the recommendations made in this interim report were agreed to unanimously by members of the Committee”, and we were proud of it.
Now, hardly a parliamentary heartbeat later, everything's changed. It's back to the future.
I'm trying, guys, to be as reasonable here as I can. I'm leaving stuff out.