There is some irony in the fact that the House of Assembly session on Friday night - which dealt the Boundaries Commission report - featured one of the finer debates of this Parliamentary session.

The irony, of course, is that this is likely to be one of the last major debates conducted by a 40-member House under the current electoral system; it is a certainty that some of those who spoke on Friday night will not be in the House after the next General Election.

The issues at stake in this debate went beyond mere numbers; the discourse went to the heart of how Bermuda should be governed and how Bermuda should go about making changes to its Constitution.

Premier Jennifer Smith, whose performances through this year-long constitutional debate have been spotty, gave one of her best speeches on the subject, clearly outlining the Government's position and its historical context. She made the case for why it must be changed and did so well, even if there was little that was new in the speech.

She also underlined the Government's opposition to a constitutional conference and/or a referendum on the issue.

Instead, the Government's position, as reiterated by one Progressive Labour Party speaker after another, was that the change to a smaller House with single seat constituencies was in its election manifesto and it therefore had a mandate to make the change.

This epitomises the PLP's approach to government. Governments are elected to lead and will do so during their term of office. When the next election comes, the voters will decide if they wish to continue with that leadership or if they will change it.

Here the Government got some unexpected support from former United Bermuda Party Premier Pamela Gordon, who broke ranks with her party's call for a referendum and/or conference.

Ms Gordon reversed her own previously held position, not because she necessarily agreed with the Government, but because she held that a referendum or conference was redundant because it is Britain, ultimately, that must decide on any change for its colony.

She went on to criticise Britain, rightly, for making up the rules for constitutional change as it went along, but in doing so, she made the argument against her own position.

It is precisely because Bermuda has no mechanism for constitutional change that Britain can and has "made it up"; a referendum, while not binding on Britain, would give the British Government the clearest possible message of where the Island wishes to go and would make it exceedingly difficult for the UK to take a different approach.

The logical extension to Ms Gordon's argument was made earlier by Attorney General Lois Browne Evans who said Bermuda could only unilaterally change its Constitution after Independence.

But it would seem that the rest of the UBP argued in favour of a halfway house by calling for more public involvement in debates of this kind. While it can be argued that the UBP is preaching what it did not always practise when it was in Government, it does present a starkly different approach from the PLP. In essence, the UBP is arguing that on questions like constitutional change, the voters are intelligent and mature enough to make up their own minds about what kind of change they want and should be consulted as they go along, rather than be held to one point out of many in a manifesto published four years ago. That does not change, whether Bermuda is independent or not.

It can be argued that there is now a level of public acceptance of the changes proposed by the Boundaries Commission that did not exist 12 months ago.

But that is only because of the level of public involvement in this debate is immeasurably higher than the Government envisaged when it proposed these changes last summer.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine that the Island's leaders would have debated so hard and so well on Friday had it not been for the wide airing of the issues that have taken place in the last 12 months.

The shame is that the public could have had a fuller say and true participation in the process. They have now been deprived of that.