Madam Speaker, I suspect they are best explained by self-interest. That goes further than anything else.
I have outlined a scenario that I sincerely believe is what was afoot. I think that at some point the Prime Minister realized things were not going to go the way he wanted them to, and he then tried to find an exit ramp. He chose it somewhat clumsily and prolonged his own suffering more than he had to.
Ultimately, the real point I have been trying to make is that the Prime Minister was only ever willing to act in his own interest. The first-past-the-post system is not a bad system from the point of view of the Liberal Party of Canada. It has caused that party to win a greater share of the seats than its vote share would warrant in most of the elections since Confederation, and has caused it to be in power more than half the time, a good deal more than half the time. It is not a bad system for them; it is just not the best system.
The very best of all is preferential or ranked ballots. He was therefore willing to consider that. He was actually remarkably consistent in this point, and only veered away for rhetorical purposes. Even then, he only got away with it because we were not looking very closely. People wanted to believe in him.
There will be no expectation of consensus on anything the government genuinely wants. I see no effort to seek out consensus in favour of support for endless subsidies to Bombardier, for example.