That's a good question.
I think we can be overly portentous about these things. As I said in that paper, there's nothing wrong with having a great party just to have a party, even if it doesn't have any consequences. Of course, Expo and the centennial did have consequences in terms of a lot of good infrastructure. There are concert halls, libraries, art centres, bridges, and sidewalks all over the country that have Expo or the centennial on them.
I suppose, as I said, things might have been worse without Expo, because things got bad very quickly after Expo. It had nothing to with the centennial. Pierre Berton called 1967 Canada's last good year until about the 1990s, or sometime. We just ran into one problem after another thereafter. Perhaps there were global reasons for that and historical reasons for that. That's why, having been at Expo and having had a great time at the age of 21 in Montreal, when I was thinking about this idea of 2017, I wondered whether there's another way to come at it, where the odds of having a more constructive, lasting consequence would be higher than just having another world's fair, or building another building or having some parties.
If you're thinking about where the country is today and where it is going, there's a saying that if you don't change direction you're likely to end up where you're headed. On multiculturalism, I think we're headed in the right direction, so I don't think we have to change direction. As I put it in the paper, if that's true, gas up, hold onto the wheel and make sure you don't go into the ditch, because the challenges of multiculturalism are thicker now.
There are no guarantees, but I really like Brian's idea of a legacy of consciousness or legacy of relationships and building character. These are incredibly important things to do for a country. I really admire this meeting of the committee because most countries don't even have the capacity to think in these terms about themselves going forward. They're thinking about much more basic things, because they're not as wealthy as we are—or perhaps because they don't have our past. It's a marvel to be able, as a country, to think about a 150th birthday as a year of character building instead of “stuff building”, of relationship building instead of trophy building. It's a marvel to be able to talk about it like this.