Canada's confidence convention is notoriously uncodified. We saw some of that even this week in the latitude the Prime Minister has, for instance, in deeming any vote a confidence vote. In the last Parliament—where it mattered less because it was a majority Parliament—some nights we would vote through the night on hundreds of estimates votes. Some people are of the opinion that any one of those votes is a matter of confidence and could cause an election. Others are not of that view.
From the point of view of Elections Canada, if Parliament were to adopt a more rigorous concept of the confidence convention in order to give more predictability around when an election might start, and if that latitude were limited in some ways so that we could have a better idea of when there was a real election threat happening, would that be helpful in the planning of an election—without speaking to the substantive merits of those changes?