Mr. Speaker, I suppose, in principle, that the answer to that question would be yes. However, in 1856, in the volume I brought from the library, they were debating the fact that they had an appointed upper house then and were not getting the highest quality appointments. One hundred and sixty years of failed attempts to have the best quality people be the only ones appointed to the Senate suggests to me that in reality, keeping with an appointed system is unlikely to produce the highest quality appointees possible.
I hasten to add that I mean no disrespect to the members who are there now, either the current ones or the previous ones. However, as a practical matter, I think we all understand that in this House, we would not improve the quality if we went for an appointed system. The same thing applies everywhere.
There were very few precedents in the 1850s and 1860s for elected upper houses. The Senate in the United States was not elected until the second decade of the 20th century. Exactly 100 years ago, it made an amendment. Australia did not move to an elected upper house until about 1901. The upper house in Britain is still not elected. That is a system that at the time seemed modern. I do not think it works so well now.
While I think the NDP proposal opens up the constitution, all the questions asked of the Supreme Court are about which amending formula could be used. How do we narrow this down so that we do not need the formal consent of every province, creating the danger that a province will say that it is not giving its consent unless we open up some other area to it? That is a particular fear. We would wind up having macro-constitutional reform. What we seek here, and this is the appropriate approach for any mature democracy, is micro-constitutional reform that deals with one issue at a time.
That is what I hope will be achieved here. What we are trying to find out from the Supreme Court is whether that is possible for each of the questions.