Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for the question. Allow me to clarify. Perhaps my colleague missed a comma somewhere or perhaps I was unclear, but I never talked about unanimous consent. I talked about a consensual approach.
Obviously unanimous consent is the dream, and I continue to dream about it. When we make changes to legislation as fundamental as legislation on our electoral system, I hope that we can take the time to arrive at an agreement among parties. Perhaps we can hope for the best from the Conservatives, who seem to want to present themselves in a new light since Mr. Harper left the scene. Maybe they will even abandon some of their old positions and see the merits of a new approach.
If unanimous consent were indeed possible, I would be delighted. However, what I was really talking about is a consensual approach that ensures that the party in power does not bulldoze the others in the interest of its own demands and its quest for a political image in order to ram through an idea without the consent of at least some of the other parties.
I would remind hon. members that at the very beginning of the process, when the possibility of changing the voting system was first discussed, it was thanks to a consensual NPD proposal accepted by the Liberals that it was agreed that a committee would be struck. It was a committee in which every MP from every party could be involved and where every member had the right to speak and vote. If an NDP proposal led to this outcome, I do not see how another NPD proposal could not reach consensus as well. Honestly, I believe that we are the masters of common sense.