:
I'd like to call the meeting to order.
Pursuant to the order of reference from the House of Commons of February 13, 2008, the Legislative Committee on Bill will now resume its study of the bill.
I would like to inform the committee that it shall reserve the last 20 minutes at the end of the meeting in camera in order to discuss internal matters, such as what has been done by the subcommittee on agenda and procedure regarding the list of witnesses, the upcoming calendar, and the adoption of the budget. Moreover, as everyone knows, the bells will start ringing at 5:15 sharp for votes. Therefore, we'll have between 80 and 90 minutes with our witnesses today.
I know all of you are eager after the Easter break, after consulting with your constituents about this bill. So I know you're eager to pose our Privy Council officials many questions. Please allow me first to introduce them.
We have as witnesses today: Dan McDougall, director of operations; Isa Gros-Louis, director; and Grégoire Webber.
Welcome. You have the floor.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
We are pleased to be here today to discuss Bill C-20 — the Senate Appointment Consultations Act. We would like to review with the Committee the policy framework for the bill, as well as discuss the structure of the bill, and any details of this legislative proposal.
In the first instance, in order to set the context, I think it may be useful to start off with a brief description of what the bill does not do.
[English]
To start with, the bill does not provide for a process for electing senators. Rather, much like the Referendum Act, it sets out a scheme for consultations with Canadians, without binding the Prime Minister or the Governor General to the results of a consultation.
As well, as was discussed briefly with the committee when the minister appeared before you, neither does Bill amend the Constitution of Canada. Indeed, the bill has been carefully drafted so as not to affect the Governor General's power to appoint senators, the Prime Minister's prerogative to recommend persons for appointment to the Senate, the constitutional qualifications of senators, or indeed the role of the Senate as arbiter of the eligibility of senators.
However, what the bill does do is provide a bank of names of persons from which the Prime Minister may choose to make a recommendation for appointment to the Senate as vacancies arise. Persons appointed from this list will have the democratic support of voters.
The bill provides that a consultation normally will be held in conjunction with a federal general election. The Governor in Council can make an order for consultation, and the consultation process, which relies extensively on the Canada Elections Act, will be administered by the Chief Electoral Officer.
The bill provides that a consultation could also be held in conjunction with a provincial general election, provided that six months' notice is so given.
Bill provides flexibility as to whether and when to use a consultation, in how many provinces to hold a consultation during a federal or provincial election, and for how many places. The number of places is not determined by the number of vacancies in the Senate. Even if there are no existing vacancies in a province, a consultation may be held for the number of places specified in the order for a consultation. This flexibility may help to ensure that nominees are available to fill seats as they become vacant.
[Translation]
Canadians may register their nominations at any time with the Chief Electoral Officer. They do not need to wait for an order for consultation to be issued. A nominee must be 30 years of age or older, and must be a Canadian citizen. Of course, prior to being called to take up a place in the Senate, a nominee would need to comply with the other eligibility criteria that are set out in the Constitution.
Once registered, nominees may begin to accept contributions for their campaign. The rules governing contributions are based on the rules applicable to candidates for members of Parliament, as outlined in the Canada Elections Act, with some exceptions. For example, candidates for election to the House must wait until an election is called before they can issue receipts for contributions.
[English]
Given the different role of parties in the Senate, as compared to the House, political parties will have a limited role in relation to Senate nominees. The bill provides that parties may endorse a nominee, but may not endorse more nominees in a province than there are places specified in the order of a consultation. Parties will not be able to transfer funds to Senate nominees. There will be no Senate-only parties. To conduct advertising, parties will have to register as a third party, and parties will not control the order of nominees on the ballot, nor will candidates be grouped on the ballot by party.
Consultations will be province wide, allowing voters to indicate their preferences amongst all nominees in that province. The voter will be able to rank his or her preferred candidates as one, two, three, and so on, expressing as many or as few preferences as desired, across or within party lines employing whatever criteria are favoured by the voter. The designed principle of the bill is to provide as much flexibility as possible to the voter. Complementing that principle, the proposed voting system, called a single transferable vote or STV, is also designed to reflect as closely as possible the intentions of the voters.
The bill provides that, after counting the votes, a list of selected nominees for each province in which a consultation is held will be submitted by the chief electoral officer to the Prime Minister for his consideration. The bill also provides that the chief electoral officer must also publish this report, along with other details of the vote, in the Canada Gazette without delay.
[Translation]
In the interests of time, perhaps I could just highlight some of the other key provisions of the bill. There are extensive sections of the bill dealing with advertising and communications, with third-party advertising, with financial administration and, of course, a section dealing with enforcement.
As a general statement, these provisions are complementary to comparable provisions in the Canada Elections Act, taking care always to have the least impact possible on the actual functioning of that Act, and making the necessary adaptations of the provisions to reflect the nature of the process created by the Senate consultations bill.
Madam Chair, I thank you for the opportunity to appear before the Committee. We will now be pleased to take questions from the members.
:
The single transferrable vote system is a system designed to reflect as closely as possible the preferences of voters. It works in single ridings where you only have one person, in which case it transforms itself into something else called an alternative system—but it works there as well. But its real utility tends to be when there are multiple persons to be selected from a voting process. It doesn't have to be an electoral process; it could be any process that is designed to select anything. That is the intent, to give effect to people's desires.
In terms of how it works, it's actually fairly simple for the voter. I would suggest that it is almost intuitively simple. What it does is that people go into a voting process and express their preferences, one, two, three, etc., in terms of whom they would like to see selected from that process. That's as complicated as it has to get for the individual.
Where it becomes somewhat complicated is for the administrators, who have to understand how the system works. There's a mathematical process associated with it.
The first thing that's done in terms of administrating and counting the votes is that you have to determine the number of votes required for a person to be successful. For members of Parliament and most other elections here in Canada now, with the “first past the post” system, that's fairly easy: it's 50% plus one. When you have more than one member, obviously that number changes. If you have three places, then you need to get one-third of the votes. If you have four places, then you need to get one-quarter of the votes, etc.
So there is a formula that determines the quota of votes necessary to be successful. All the quota is trying to do is to make sure that when the votes are counted.... Should you arrive at a situation where everybody splits their vote equally among all the candidates, and you have three places to be elected, the quota is designed to ensure that only three people can be successful, not four, just as 50% plus one means that one person gets 51% and the other 49%. There's only one person who can be elected. The quota is designed to ensure that if you have four places, only four people can get that number, not five. If there are three places, only three people can get that number. It's just a simple mathematical formula to determine how many votes you need, so that you're sharing the votes equally.
Once the quota is determined, then you start to look at the ballots and the preferences that have been expressed by the voters on those ballots. As I mentioned, the voter goes in and ranks the candidates on the voting list, one, two, three, four, etc., according to however many preferences they wish to express. And this bill has been designed to try to give as much flexibility as possible to the voter to decide how they want to follow that procedure. So if they only know one candidate and only want to vote for the one candidate, the bill allows them to just mark one and they will still have a perfectly valid ballot. If they know two candidates and they want to express their preferences about one and two, that's fine as well. If there are 17 candidates and they want to go from 1 through 17, they can do that as well.
So the intention of the bill is to give the maximum flexibility to the voters to express their preferences as they wish.
So far, we have determined the quota, that is, how many votes are required for someone to be successful. The next step in the process is to look a the ballots, and the first step is to count up how many first preferences the voters have expressed for all of the candidates. So you would look at the number of first-place preferences on the ballots and count up those. If I'm a candidate and the quota is determined to be 50 and I have 50-plus first-place preference votes, then my name goes on the list automatically. If, for example, there were three Senate places being considered for a province, and they count up all the first-place preferences and three people have more than 50 votes, then all three would go on the list and that would be the end of it.
It gets a little more complicated when you count up the first preferences and nobody makes the list, or one person makes the list and you still have two more. Then as a first step you take the successful person, and if they received more votes than necessary to be selected, you take their surplus votes and transfer them to other candidates who have not yet been successful. So you look at the second preferences on those ballots, and those votes, as expressed by the voter, are then transferred over to other candidates. Once that has been done, you look again to see whether those people have attained the quota, and if so, you stop; if not, you continue the process. And the process just continues on and on.
If at any point after the transfer of surplus votes—that is, I received more votes than I needed as a candidate and those have been transferred to other candidates—nobody has yet attained a quota and you still have places to fill, then you go to the other end and start dropping the candidates who received the least number of votes. You go to the end of the list, and the person who got the least number of votes is eliminated from the counting process. On those ballots, you look at who the second preference was, or the next available preference, and then you transfer those votes to the other candidates who the voters expressed as their second preference.
In this case, it would be number two, but if it were later in the process, the words in the bill refer to “the next available preference”. So it depends on where you are in the process.
:
So you have to be 35, you can spend as much money as you want, and then when you get there....
Is it 30 or 35? You have to be 30, you can spend as much money as you want and then when you get there, you're not even guaranteed that your democratic votes count, because it's still an appointment.
If we're talking about democratic reform, doesn't the word “democratic” come first? It seems to me we're putting in a lot of window dressing, because what you said earlier is that there's “difficulty” in achieving an elected Senate. So are we just walking our public around in a whole bunch of circles to take them nowhere, because you can't come back to us and tell us we can get an elected Senate? The senators, number one, will say they're not going along with it. We're going to have to go back to the provinces, and the provinces are going to say no.
So we're back to the situation where nothing is really going to change. Is that why we're not dealing with the issue of an elected Senate and going down this route?
:
I think perhaps a bit of clarification on the spending point might be useful for members.
The spending limit was something that was looked at in constructing the bill. The reason there's no spending limit is this. In a province-wide election, if you take your case of Ontario, as an example, there's roughly a population of voters in Ontario of 12 million or so. If you apply the spending limits that are currently in place for an MP, it works out to be roughly 80¢ per voter. If you take 80¢ per voter and multiply that by a province-wide population of 12 million, you have a spending limit of roughly $9 million or $10 million. If you compare that to the restrictions on contributions, and the fact that I, as a candidate, can only contribute $2,100 to my own campaign—there are no corporate donations, no third-party donations, no union donations—the possibility of raising $9 million, as an individual candidate, becomes rather difficult, it would seem to me, at least.
:
Thank you to our witnesses--all three of you--for coming here.
I have some questions about the single transferable vote system, but before I do that I just want to inquire....
Mr. Angus suggested one candidate might raise $800,000. As a practical matter—I guess this is more in the way of a comment than a question—we can all as MPs raise money for our riding associations from anywhere in the country. I'm unaware of anybody who has raised anywhere near $800,000 through their local campaign, and of course that information is all publicly available. I think a little perspective is required. The impositions we've put, particularly with the elimination of corporate fundraising, make it unlikely that anyone could simply buy their way to office through running massive advertising campaigns funded by massive spending. It's a practical matter.
I want to ask about the voting system. On the single transferable vote system, you didn't say this, but I gather this is the same system, in rough terms, that was voted on in British Columbia, in the referendum a few years back.
:
Maybe before I answer that directly, I would say that we looked closely at the Australian situation when we were designing this bill, because we thought it was very instructive of the way a system could work. They are on the Westminster system. Their traditions are very similar to ours. Their legislation has worked very effectively over a number of years. They've had it for a very long time in Australia, so we looked closely at their rules, and to the extent we could, we actually followed them as a model.
We did differ in a number of instances here, though, in this bill and precisely in the ways that you're suggesting. The emphasis in Australia is very strongly oriented towards the party. As you mentioned, there's an option on the ballot in Australia, so that instead of making your selections of one, two, three, or however many candidates you want to select, you can simply tick off the box that says you vote for this party, and then the party determines the order of the candidates that they would like to see.
There was a conscious policy decision taken by the government here that that wouldn't be the case here, again in keeping with the desire to try to diminish the influence of parties in the process and make sure the Senate retained a degree of independence from what's happening on the Commons side, on the lower house side.
So this bill does not contain provisions comparable to those found in the Australian model.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. McDougall, I would like to come back to the very beginning, when you were describing the system at the request of my colleague. There is one thing I don't really understand, and it has to do with transferring votes once the quota has been determined. The surplus is transferred to the individual who has ranked second. His excess is transferred to the person ranked third, and so on. Subsequently, you start the process all over again starting from the bottom.
I would like to present you with a scenario. Supposing we are talking about a candidate for a Senate seat from Quebec. Quebec is very large and we all know how expensive it is to visit all the communities, particularly in Northern Quebec. A person might wonder what the point is of travelling all across Quebec to meet with people and get as many votes as possible when, in any case, the quota is only 555 votes, for example. All the candidate has to do is make sure he or she will receive 600 or 700 votes, without having to go up to Northern Quebec. The candidate may decide just to stay in Laval, the area he or she knows best, and get the 500 votes there.
What is the logic behind this idea of transferring votes from the top-ranked candidate to the one in second place, and from the second-ranked candidate to the one in third place? Doesn't that take away from the democratic nature of the process, as we were talking about earlier?
:
Maybe I can explain. There are three ways you could do this for the ones with the surplus number of votes. You could just look at those surpluses and ask what are the numbers on those, for number two, which would be the next instance. So of those surplus, you ask who is number two, and we'll give the votes there. That would be one way.
A second way would be to do a random selection. The problem with doing it that way is that you don't know that the number two preference on the 52nd ballot that is over the surplus isn't the same as the first person. Maybe the first person who contributed to your surplus had very different ideas as to who should be number two.
So what the process has provided for in the bill here is that you look at all the ballots, every one of them, and you look for that candidate who has received more than a surplus. You look at each ballot, and you look for what was the second preference for all of those persons. So every ballot is in play.
Then what you need to do is to determine what is the value of those. So the process here is that you calculate what's called a “transfer value”. The transfer value is simply that you would essentially consider the vote to be a whole number one, so what portion of that vote of the first preference would have been necessary in order to just achieve the quota and nothing more?
If, for example, I needed only 75% of every person's vote in here in order to reach the quota, that means that 25% of everybody's vote in here can be used for the second preference that everybody in here expressed.
:
Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Mr. McDougall.
I have to admit that while I'm very familiar with the concept of preferential balloting, I'm a little confused on the STV. In one of my former lives, for several years in Saskatchewan we used the concept of preferential balloting for nomination meetings. That's when you select, at the end of the day, only one candidate. It's fairly simple, although the administrators, the people counting the ballots, have to do so manually, and it takes some time if you have many candidates running.
So I would agree with Mr. Maloney's suggestion that perhaps there be some further explanation, either written or otherwise. It may be worthwhile, actually, to show in a demonstration how this thing works, because it does get a little confusing.
The one point I would make...and this we found out in Saskatchewan when we set up our own preferential balloting system. We examined the process in Australia and New Zealand, and we did a lot of field testing. I think Mr. McDougall mentioned the proposal that voters would mark on the ballot their preference among multi candidates by saying one, two, three, or four, indicating their first choice, their second preference, their third preference, and their fourth.
We found that voters are far more used to marking Xs rather than one, two, three, or four. So what we did on our ballots, if you can kind of imagine this, is put the names of the candidates vertically down the left-hand side, and horizontally across the top of the ballot would be first choice, second choice, third choice, fourth choice. People would just mark an X corresponding with the name and the choice they wanted. They didn't mark one, two, three, or four. We found that this avoided a whole bunch of confusion.
So if this is introduced in the form you're suggesting, I think there would have to be a whole bunch of education for voters on how to cast their ballots. I would just put that out as a suggestion. You may want to take a look at designing a system so that people can actually mark their preference with an X rather than a number. It might prove to be a little easier.
I have a couple of other comments, just based on some of the conversation and questions around the table. One question was that if there's not really an elected Senate and the Prime Minister still has the ability to appoint whomever he wishes, where's the democracy in that? Well, I think it's because of the constitutional challenges that could occur. Right now, to my understanding, in order to have an elected Senate you'd have to change the Constitution. But I know we'll have constitutional experts coming in later as witnesses.
There's no way the provinces would agree--I think Mr. Angus is quite correct, you wouldn't see seven provinces and 50% of the population agree--to an elected Senate, so this would still be the next best thing. It would allow the voters in each province to express their preference of who they would like to see as their senator, or senators, without having them elected. The Prime Minister then would appoint them, as in the current process, but probably based on the votes received by each of the candidates.
I would suggest that if a prime minister wanted to appoint someone other than the person who received the most amount of votes in the consultation process, then he would be doing so at his political peril. If he wanted to do that, if he wanted to appoint whomever he wished, then why would he go through this whole process of having consultations?
I think what the minister is trying to do here is to at least allow the people of each province a chance to express their preference. I think it would be natural to assume that the Prime Minister then, regardless of who received the most votes, will say, well, I'll appoint that person because the province expressed its opinion through a consultation process. That's the fail-safe system, I believe. I would like your comments on that.
If in the design of this system the bill were put together to allow constitutional challenges...because I can see that if we had straight elections, we'd be in a morass constitutionally. This is the next best system, I guess, to avoid getting into a whole constitutional crisis. Would that be an accurate statement, that this is something that will not--in your opinion, at least--result in any constitutional problems but will still allow voters to express their preference?
:
That would certainly be our opinion. To begin with, we were very conscious of the way the Constitution is constructed and what is necessary if one wishes to change the method of selection. That requires an amendment to the Constitution, as you mentioned, with seven provinces representing 50% of the population agreeing to that. As we have seen in the past, multilateral, complex, comprehensive constitutional change with respect to the Senate has been impossible to achieve. Indeed, the confederation of the provinces studied this for several years and were unable to come to any conclusion themselves as to how they would proceed with Senate reform.
As you suggest, from a democratic reform perspective, this would be the next best thing, where you're working within the existing system with the powers that are currently provided to the Governor General to appoint senators and the prerogative of the Prime Minister to make recommendations to the Governor General. This bill certainly respects those parameters and was designed with that in mind.
There are a number of ways, as I mentioned earlier, and some of the flexibility that we've designed into this process is designed to reflect those constraints as well.
The Prime Minister decides whether to invoke the process in the first instance. There's no obligation on the Prime Minister to have a consultation. The Prime Minister decides for how many provinces a consultation will be held. The Prime Minister decides whether it will be with a federal general election or in conjunction with a provincial general election. There is no obligation on the Prime Minister that forces the Prime Minister to make a recommendation to the Governor General. The flexibility is left with respect to the Prime Minister to do that. All of those design parameters are to reflect the constraints we have in the Constitution.
So yes, very much so.
To comment on your earlier point, in terms of the simplicity of design, the complexities, as I mentioned earlier, are really for the administrators. In terms of the voters, I think everywhere the STV system has been deployed--Australia, the United Kingdom, in some of the emerging democracies, and in the former Soviet Union--there's been no instance of the voters having difficulty following the system.
It is important that the voters have confidence that the process is well designed and properly administered. I think we have some strong degree of favour here in that Canada has a very well-regarded electoral system and electoral process with Elections Canada. We're a leg up on many other jurisdictions, if you will. Voter education I think will be particularly important on this. And everywhere this system has been deployed for the first time, the focus of voter education has indeed been on the simplicity of the system from a voter's perspective rather than from an administrator's perspective.
:
In the first instance, I guess the Constitution currently provides for the process for selecting senators. When I say “process”, it's not much of a process. The Governor General summons persons to the Senate, and it's by constitutional convention that the process of the Governor General doing so is on the advice of the Prime Minister.
The Constitution also provides that if you're to change the process of selection of senators—as I just said, it's set out in the Constitution—that would require what's called a complex constitutional amendment with the engagement of the provinces. As I think we've indicated, there's little prospect of that happening in the short term. So the next best approach, from a democratic reform perspective, is to ascertain as strongly as possible the wishes of Canadians directly as to whom they would like to have represent them in the Senate, recognizing that Senate appointments currently, except in Quebec, are province wide. Of course, in the case of Quebec, there are provisions in the Constitution that senators are appointed for electoral districts--24 electoral districts in Quebec.
Those are the general parameters surrounding the Constitution and what's required currently within it. This bill is certainly designed with those in mind. As you mentioned, the bill is crafted so as to ensure we don't trip over those provisions and provide for a process that's not respecting those.
The bill provides a number of areas of flexibility for the Prime Minister in terms of when to use the consultation instrument and how to use it. It's the Prime Minister who's deciding the type of advice he would like to get from the Canadian public--it's advice to him--and then he can make his decision in terms of recommendations to the Governor General. It's a political imperative that's created, as Mr. Lukiwski mentioned, rather than a legal imperative. There's no obligation on the Prime Minister to select anybody from the list. Presumably there may be political consequences for a prime minister deploying an instrument such as this and then not relying on the results from it.
In that way it's very similar perhaps to another bill that's been passed by Parliament in this session, with respect to fixed election dates, where the prerogative of the Prime Minister has some self-imposed constraints put upon it. That's certainly what's happening here, again, respecting as that bill did, the constitutional limitations as to what the Prime Minister, the government acting alone, can do.
:
I find it unfortunate that when we have an issue like this where it should be so easy for us to be at least respectful, we have one committee member who decides he has to use terms like “puppet show”. I don't know how that feeds into our trying to operate in a respectful manner. Unfortunately, it's increasingly how the standing committees operate. I was hopeful that perhaps a legislative committee wouldn't be subjected to that. My apologies to the witnesses.
I'd like to pick up on some of the comments Mr. Angus made. I've been here for almost 15 years. I'm a strong advocate for Senate reform--I've said this before--and I find it extremely disturbing that the fallback position for many of my colleagues from other parties always seems to be that if you can't go all the way toward an elected Senate--in other words, change the Constitution.... We know all the hurdles. Many of us, even if we weren't here, certainly viewed the country seized with the machinations of Meech Lake and the Charlottetown accord and where all that led, frustratingly so, in the end.
I find it disappointing that we can't view this, discuss this, and debate this as an improvement, because that's how I see it. It's a step in the right direction. It's not the whole enchilada, so to speak, but at least it would give Canadians some choice.
Mr. Angus asked how do we know that electors are going to buy into this and suggested that perhaps there was no benefit. From my window, I think they will buy in because they're going to be given some choice that they don't have now at all.
The default position is to go back to the system we have, whereby traditionally a Liberal prime minister appoints Liberals to the Senate and a Conservative appoints Conservatives to the Senate. If we want that archaic system in this country, that's what we can have. But I think is an honest attempt to do what we can, respecting the confines of the Constitution. That's what I hear from the witness as well.
He asked, “How do we suggest the public would buy in?” I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think somewhere around 300,000 Albertans voted in a Senate selection there--far more than the 100,000 or so who ever voted for any single MP in a riding. We're lucky if we get half of the eligible voters out to vote any more.
I think this constitutes a good step forward, and it is a step toward democratic reform. We should try to discuss that within those confines.
I would like to ask the witnesses to comment further on this whole notion that somehow the public wouldn't buy in if they were given an opportunity. I think the experience in Alberta--and I don't think it would be dramatically different in other provinces--suggests otherwise.
:
Perhaps I can respond on the last point about the public buying in.
Certainly any indications we have seen in terms of public will on Senate reform show that there's a very strong inclination among the public that the Senate be reformed in some manner. I think it's fair to say that following some unsuccessful constitutional reforms, the public was weary of reform and that maybe following on that they're now wary of reform. So incremental reform does seem to be somewhat appealing to them.
The government undertook some national consultations over the past year. One of the topics was Senate reform. There were citizens selected from across each province and from the territories to participate in a day-and-a-half session on democratic reform. One of the topics was the Senate. Overwhelmingly in those sessions there was a strong inclination expressed by the participants, who were randomly selected from the public, that the Senate be reformed. Indeed, they were wary of complex constitutional reform, fearing that it would end up, as many other attempts at Senate reform have done, going nowhere. That came out strongly right across the country, in every province.
Similarly, there was a corresponding national poll conducted to try to assess whether the views among the general public, which didn't participate in the forums, were different from those who participated. Again, the results were very similar. It was strong, as I recall, up in the 60% or 70% range. Here it shows that it was 79% of Canadians who support Senate reform in some manner. And there was strong support for incremental reform, that is, getting done whatever can be done.
:
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I'll be quick.
I think it's kind of sad, when we talk about respecting and disrespecting each other, that anyone who questions or disagrees with a particular point of view is seen as causing trouble. I have never seen it that way. I think there's room for disagreement around the table, and at the end of the day, we can come up with what we agree on. It should be done in a respectful manner, but disagreeing in itself is not necessarily disrespectful.
I wanted to ask a question, because I think the issue of democracy and democratic reform is obviously at the heart of what everybody is trying to talk about. I would suggest to you that when the majority of people said they wanted to see Senate reform, I think they meant they wanted to have a say in how senators get to where they are. I would think that most people would believe that this is an extraordinarily expensive way to find out what people think. To then have someone decide that they don't even like their choices, I think, is not democratic.
Second, it's very undemocratic to suggest that in order to run, you have to find $4 million. You're self-selecting a whole bunch of people who cannot run because they can't ever achieve that kind of money. So while I understand the need for reform, accept it, and understand that you don't want to go the whole route for constitutional change, I think there is a way of discussing how this can become more democratic.
To have people believe that the cost of going out and doing this is acceptable, they would have to know that it wasn't just, “Thank you very much, but I don't think I like any of these guys”. I know why they say you couldn't do that and that nobody would do that, but we have seen instances when this government has done things that we believe are undemocratic. For me, there's an issue of trust here, and there's an issue of actually being democratic.