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Hence the Liberals’ last-ditch attempt to derail the committee by means of a parallel public consultation process, involving mass mailouts and online questionnaires, whose transparent purpose is to discover what the Democratic Institutions minister has already found: that there is, as she informed the committee Thursday, “no consensus” among Canadians on which type of reform to pursue.

Well, no. You’re hardly likely to find a consensus on reform in advance of anyone proposing any. I rather thought that was the politicians’ job: to forge consensus, to point the way forward and rally the public behind them. Or, failing that, to put the matter before the public and let it decide.

The latter course seems more likely now that the NDP has dropped its objections, though not before it was provided with evidence that reform might pass such a test, via the recent plebiscite in Prince Edward Island. Voters there were asked to choose among five different electoral systems, using a ranked ballot; the winner, a form of proportional representation, was declared after four rounds of counting, with 52.4 per cent of the vote.

This seems a useful starting point in designing a federal referendum. It clearly can’t be a simple yes-no ballot: if there were a consensus on a single reform model there would be no need for a referendum, and in any event there is no reason the current system should be the default option. There’s a strong argument for leaving it off the ballot altogether — the Liberals having been elected on the promise that 2015 should be “the last election” to use it — but if it is to be on the ballot it should just be one option among the others.