Foreign Affairs committee  That's good. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for inviting me. I have written a paper that I'd be happy to distribute to the clerk once it's properly formatted. I'll speak to that paper extemporaneously and it will be a more substantial offering that you're free to peruse in your o

Electoral Reform committee  I would just add to that again on implementation issues around education. It's not only who would do it, but also the amount of time necessary for it to be done. It's a huge educative process, and rushed processes are ones that don't get well understood. Therefore, it's a necessi

Electoral Reform committee  My experience has been that negotiations in private basically are the way to get things done in the most efficient way. It's not that public negotiations can't succeed; they can, but it's one of the complexities or anomalies of our system that cameras and the public face become a

Electoral Reform committee  I think this committee has had the great advantage of going in depth on these issues, having people from different perspectives around the world. One of the responsibilities that I would recommend to you as you do your work is to do the kinds of lists and think about the possible

Electoral Reform committee  We could have the Sergeant-at-Arms or the Speaker here, or the Board of Internal Economy, but I'm not sure how much more space our House of Commons could take in terms of increased numbers of members, unless we get away from the Canadian tradition, which is that every member has

Electoral Reform committee  It depends on how the executive responds to the minority parties. Are they in fact accommodative, or is every party competitive, or are they antagonistic? When I first came to Ottawa, which was in the Jurassic age, my minister was Walter Gordon, then president of the Privy Counci

Electoral Reform committee  No, I don't. The two houses of Parliament have differing virtues. Partisanship is critical to our party system. It's the cockpit of the House of Commons, and it has democratic legitimacy. I've used David Smith's term about the people's parliament. The role of the Senate is more f

Electoral Reform committee  One of the advantages of first past the post and one of the reasons it was supported in the referendums in British Columbia, Ontario, and so on—and it's not to be discounted—is it's simple and it's easy to understand. We're used to it, and simplicity in your electoral system is a

Electoral Reform committee  I am with Professor Harrington in this regard: Parliaments make big decisions, and parliamentarians are trustees of the public interest. In that trustee function, though we need education about this, I still think the beginning is that a Parliament could make this kind of decisio

Electoral Reform committee  I would just repeat that of the changes to the pillars of our electoral system—how one creates boundaries, the very franchise itself, and increasingly the franchise to women and young people under 18—in every single case the changes were done by Parliament, and therefore I think

Electoral Reform committee  Consensus in committee is not unanimity necessarily, but it is a broad set of understandings. My view is that if the government did not have consensus—again, I repeat, not unanimity—a broad sense of consensus from most of the members of this committee, I would not proceed until I

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, I do.

Electoral Reform committee  Well, I'm not the minister. I'm not her adviser—

Electoral Reform committee  I just want to repeat that in my previous experience, when you give a committee a big, crucial job, and it's an essential framework issue, as the Constitution was and as the electoral system is, looking for broad consensus—not unanimity—is something that should place very, very h

Electoral Reform committee  We can make any system work. Under a majority government system, much of the work goes on within caucus. I've been recommending here and elsewhere, as I also did at that time, a very expanded system around the committee system. One result of having more parties or larger number