Thanks.
I want to start with Professor Rose and I also want to start by thanking all three of you for being with us this morning. This panel will have heard from 20 witnesses by noon, and Madam Flumian is our first female witness since Maryam Monsef.
This is nobody's fault. I was on the steering committee; I helped pick the witnesses. It is what it is, but we're looking at a field in which apparently the experts are dominated by the Y chromosome.
Moving on, Professor Rose, what I wanted to ask is about citizens’ assemblies. I'm not taking a knock at citizens’ assemblies; I think the one in British Columbia and the one in Ontario have been fantastic. However, what I began to realize, as people didn't understand what the members of the citizens’ assembly had learned, was that as a gold standard for public education, it was almost as though you had a group of randomly selected great Canadians who threw themselves into this and cared deeply—as your article suggested, meeting through the summer in closed rooms in beautiful hot parts of Ontario because they care about democracy—and I almost felt as if these wonderful citizens emerged to say, “We have the answer”, and the rest of the public said, “What was the question?”
As a matter for public education, are there drawbacks to a citizens' assembly?