Perfect. I'm so happy that everyone wasn't nice. I was worried, because we're all non-profits and we need funding, and sometimes you just have to be honest. I think it's time that you took the training wheels off. I think you've had a great go at learning how you might do this, but this is the type of thing that is just the coolest, biggest, greatest opportunity for our democracy. I'm starting to get a sense now of how special our democracy is, because we're starting to be pulled in our work to look at other places around the world.
The student vote programs don't actually go that well in other places, or they're non-existent. I see things happen in places like Mexico, where candidates who are open about the cartels are shot on their first day of being mayor. I think that when it comes to something like this, let's stop talking about New Zealand as the leader. We should be the leader in this.
I would suggest and point out to you that you've been disempowered by time, obviously. I had to plead with Mr. Reid and Mr. Cullen, and Mr. Holland who was here earlier, to change the submission date for the town halls...if you picked up on them from October 1 to after the Thanksgiving break week...because I thought you were purposely ignoring future voters in your consultations. It might have been an accident, just as there was an accident in the Fair Elections Act that Elections Canada couldn't help facilitate our doing our work, so I get that, but I think you could engage so many more people with more time and more resources. I'm still wondering what's going on with that $10 million. You don't have it, right? I think maybe you shouldn't have it. I don't know if I should trust that you'll spend it that well, but I don't know if the best place is in PCO or Democratic Institutions. I think you need to be more empowered.
I also think this is just a plain awesome thing that you could time around Canada150. It's not a playlist for exercises. I don't know what else is going on, but it's really one of the most important things we could do. It's about who we are. What a great opportunity to maybe extend and empower this dialogue. I think you'd at least have groups like us who have incredible access to the education system. Samara has an incredible volunteer network, and other actors across the country, and INM has a great hold in Quebec, who could support you and act as allies. I think you would get some incredibly passionate people putting in 16 hours a day on this to support your effort.
After reading all the testimony, sometimes I don't know who to believe. I'm sure you face the same thing. I just doubt you could come out with a really clear recommendation to take a particular system. I would just find that hard, after reading the testimony. I don't have a university degree, so you could write me off, but....
I'm interested to see what happens and then I will invite you or I'll let you know.... We couldn't do what we wanted to do, but we scraped together a few funds and we're working to put together a series of five videos: one, an introduction video just to introduce kids to why we're even talking about this; and then four others going into different systems. We hope to have them released by the third week of September, so that if you wanted to go into a high school in your community and have kids talk about this in a substantial way, we'll have something for you to do that. We've just sent out the invitations.