Mr. Speaker, the obvious comment to make is that the sense of hurry was entirely imposed by the Liberals themselves.
It was never clear. I think it has become clear actually, but it was never stated clearly which system the Liberals preferred. There was this fiction that their minds were open, that they had not yet made up their minds, or the Prime Minister, as the former minister said, had a preferred system and so did she, but that that could be changed by the testimony they heard. The minister said that in a meeting in Victoria.
The bottom line the Liberals kept restating was that it must be ready to go by 2019. That was the sense of rush.
I have a theory, and I have shared this with my colleague in the past but let me share it with the House, that the Prime Minister had intended to run out the clock on electoral reform. First it would be too tight a timeline to have a referendum, then it would be too tight a timeline to have anything that involved redistribution or the addition of extra seats, one or the other of which is required if we go to any kind of proportional system, and finally all we have left is preferential ballot, a minor change after all, just changing the structure of the ballot itself, not the ridings or anything else. At least that was the story we would hear. However, because the promise of 2019 was sacred, the Liberals would move forward.
I think the testimony of Canadians so overwhelmingly demonstrated a lack of interest, indeed a strong opposition to a system that so clearly, methodically, election after election, favoured the Liberal Party, that it took the wind out of those sails and made it effectively impossible to move forward in that direction.
Finally, what the committee did was to demonstrate that it was possible to move forward by 2019 with a referendum on a proportional system. That point, I suspect, is when the Prime Minister said that they had to bail out of it.