It seems to me that what we've seen—again, my chapters are the history of Canada—is that the federal government has played a real leadership role, I would say starting after the Second World War, in the notion of moving Canada to this knowledge society culture and so on, and investing in a domestic research infrastructure.
You know, when I was a student at McGill in the late 1960s, almost all my professors had gotten their degrees from outside Canada. Almost all the material we used, in fact, was imported. Out of the 22 historians in the department, two taught anything about Canada.
So it's a recent phenomenon that the federal government showed real leadership, saying that in order for this country to really blossom and flourish, we must in fact now create the content, create the understanding.
It circles back to what I said, that place--surprisingly, in the digital age--now matters even more.
There was a book in the early 1990s called The Death of Distance; it said it didn't matter where you were, and we started to go down that path. It turns out now that in fact physical contact is the key and we're using the new media, the digital age, and so on, to enhance and enrich and extend physical contact. If you do not see someone physically on a reasonably regular basis, in fact you stop communicating with them through the new media, and so on, and those connections start to be broken.
That's really interesting in terms of how we now think about communities across the country, how we think about societies, and so on. There's this local-global thing going on at the same time that's fascinating.
Frankly, it was unexpected. We thought the new media was going to make where you physically were less relevant; in fact, it makes it highly relevant.