Thank you.
My name is Chai Kalevar, and I come from planet earth. I hope that most of you do. My Twitter handle is planetrypatriate, so if you want to know what I think, you can follow that.
I think we have a problem here. I'm very glad that we have so many people here, but we also have so many empty chairs. Coming in and out, we have to striptease a bit. It's not exactly a friendly situation. Even to go to the washroom, we have to striptease. If you have to also go for food, it is doubled. So please try to make it more friendly for participation.
Having said that, participation is a problem too on election day, because people are too busy, they say. Well, if they're too busy, what we can do is have election day as a holiday. Why can't we do that? We have Labour Day. We have Family Day. We have this day and that day. Why not an election day holiday? That's the first suggestion for you.
Having said that, I will say that if we are going to have some kind of referendum, I'm very sorry to see that Ontario's electoral officer is not here. He should have made the point that Ontario did a shoddy job by having the election and the referendum on the same day, for heaven's sake. The election took away from the referendum. The least you should do is confirm that you will not let that happen. The referendum day should not even come close to election day. They should be a year apart or at least a good six months apart.
Second, I will say that since we have trouble getting the young ones involved, because they don't understand it, we should have good civic education classes in high school, which we don't have. Why can't we get that done? The federal government gives money to the provinces. Make sure that civics is a primary responsibility. After all, on election day we spend our tax dollars, so for election day we should be spending our tax dollars in a way that gets people involved, especially the young ones. As they say, if you vote at 18, you vote the rest of the time, so let them get involved.
Thank you.