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For the last few weeks, the all-party committee tasked with investigating alternative federal voting models has spent nearly 18 hours sequestered behind closed doors, working on a final report that has to be presented to their Commons colleagues by the end of the month.

As is standard procedure during the drafting process, those meetings have been held in camera, which has left those of us outside the inner sanctum entirely in the dark, at least as far as what progress, if any, has been made, during those cross-table negotiations.

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Until Wednesday, that is, when New Democrat MP Nathan Cullen, who has been leading the charge at committee on behalf of his party, which has long supported a shift to more proportional representation, announced that “in order to achieve consensus,” the NDP was now willing to agree to including “the option of a referendum” among the final recommendations.

Cullen and the New Democrats have never explicitly rejected the idea of putting any proposed changes to the electoral system to a cross-country vote. In fact, they’ve occasionally floated the idea of holding one to “confirm” a change after conducting at least one vote under the new system. But this was the first time Cullen has publicly accepted – albeit “with reservations” – that giving the electorate the final say would “give Canadians a great deal of confidence” in any ensuing change.