I think that is a perfect example of what you could do.
To go to your earlier example, this is where I think you need some discipline. For example, why would the 150th birthday focus a lot on things like the Halifax explosion or Vimy Ridge, which happened a hundred years ago or at other times? There's a risk of dissipation. There's a risk of good causes, worthy ideas, coming forward and our saying that it sounds like a good thing. It wasn't 150 years ago, but it was 20 years ago or 50 years ago.
Again, the rigour, the branding, the strategic focus on getting certain things accomplished in 2017 would probably lead me to say that those are great ideas, but they don't fit under this rubric, because we have important work to do and concentrate on. That is unless somebody were able to mix up and move around on the Halifax explosion or something
Clearly, the vast parts of the country that nobody, no significant population, has ever seen or been to are there to colonized in a way in 2017. In a sense, it's a year of self-colonization, isn't it? All those people from Edmonton, where I was raised, who have never even been to Ontario, much less to the Atlantic provinces, are going to colonize their own country. We're going to go out there and find out what it's all about.
Package this and market this well as a challenge to the nation, to know thyself. Open it up to all sorts of ideas. Tell people to come to you with all of their ideas, and no idea is crazy as long as they mix up and move around. Then I think we will find people in unprecedented numbers and with a certain amount of joy, and even a kind of mischievousness, saying, for example, that they have an incredible group and they're all going up to Spence Bay and are actually going to camp there and hike 10 days and will organize a group up there to stay with and so forth.
I think we would be amazed at the creativity and the sense of fun in projects—and even competition among groups, that “I've got a better idea than you for how to make this happen”. It would be a kind of national shared idea. Who has the best ideas to mix people up, not only by ethnicity but by age, by disabilities, via all sorts of different kinds of mix-ups. Say we have a proposal, like Brian's here, that is just going to blow your mind when it comes to how many different people are going to run into each other and move out.
By the way, I thought of something when you were speaking. When I was at the Globe and Mail, we were trying to cover multiculturalism, as a newspaper. It's not a beat. How do you cover multiculturalism? I asked reporters to go to one of the most diverse high schools in Toronto and to spend two weeks there to see how the kids there were getting along. What was happening? Did they have fights in the cafeteria? Did they have gangs and cliques? What was happening? I told them to go and embed themselves in there.
They came back two weeks later to report that the kids were getting along really well. They were dating; they were in games together. There were no police and there was no conflict to any significant degree. And yet there were all these different kids. I said, “Do you mean that there's no story there, except that it's a good story?” They said no, “There's a real problem with their parents.” This was because the parent of a Chinese girl was appalled that she was dating a blonde-haired kid from Rosedale. She was appalled that her daughter wanted to go into dancing instead of physics or something. So there was a lot of intergenerational conflict, and that story turned out to be a story of conflict, not among the kids but between the kids and their parents on the basis of what the kids were doing with each other and what their career ideas were.
At any rate, there is wonderful potential for people to wake up about in Canada and to come back and become ever more mobile as a result, and for our claims on our own territory to be strengthened.