All right, I'll try to be concise.
I want to say that I can't imagine an historian who doesn't think that the past is there to guide us into the future. I would hate it if anybody assumed that I'm suggesting we gaze only backwards, because historians look back in order to move forward. That is a critical commentary.
I was sitting here thinking about people becoming part of the story, so with mix-up and move around, I think we need to leverage digital resources for this. As somebody who's lived in every region of this great country—and I currently live in the west beyond the west, living on the coast that is so far away that people forget it's part of the west—I would like to see this as inclusive as possible. Being from the west coast, I can attest to how difficult it is for our young people to get out of British Columbia. That's why they all go south. The movement is north and south, not east and west, because it's a huge country. I think we should encourage programs that allow students to mix and to move around. I was a student who participated in many of those kinds of programs.
But imagine what we could do with digital resources that could connect classrooms across the country, with resources that could connect first nations communities to non-first-nations communities, that could connect English Canadians and French Canadians, that could connect people from Richmond to people from St. John's. I think those kinds of opportunities exist today, and that is the kind of legacy that would provide us with something to move forward.
So we can mix up and move around. I'd like to see it happening physically, but I'm also saying that it can happen virtually.