I'm very, very glad you raised the issue of legacy, because it's something that I think about a great deal. By legacy, I think we all tend to refer to things of great permanence and value. To my way of thinking, there are two forms that it can take. One is the kind of physical monument that we use as landmarks in our cities and public spaces, and the other is what I think of as the monuments of human consciousness, the things that live within us. I think we sometimes tend to undervalue those because we can't see them. We all feel them, and we share them, but to understand how powerful and how long-lasting they can be, perhaps I can share an anecdote.
Something that I remember reading with keen interest about eight or ten years ago was that there were researchers at Laval University who were going to very small rural communities across Quebec and collecting folk songs that the farm people were still singing. They managed to trace the origins of those folk songs back to France in the Middle Ages—in fact, to the 1100s. None of these folk songs were preserved in France because of the sudden break that took place with the French Revolution, so the last repository was, in fact, here in Quebec. Imagine 800 years of a shared conscious legacy. It's something that holds people together and is powerfully felt.
When we create experiences that are jointly shared by people, whether they're positive or they're national traumas and tragedies, they affect us and they last going forward. So this is really an opportunity to create that kind of intense enriching experience, and those of us who were around in the centennial year—perhaps not all of us were—know that it was a transforming movement. We all sang the songs. We all shared the pride. We all felt that rush of confidence, and I think that we all carry around part of that within ourselves today and have passed it along even to young Canadians who weren't there.
We certainly have some absolutely magnificent historical sites and edifices and, of course, they should be added to, and maintained, preserved, loved, and cherished because they symbolize that inner experience. But if we can invest in that legacy of consciousness, I think that's probably the one that's going to pay the lasting dividends for the nation.