Hi. I'm talking to you tonight both as a parent of two teenagers, one 16 and one 18, and also as someone who grew up in southern Ontario, in the ridings where there are a lot of people. I also moved north. I lived in the Northwest Territories and experienced that system, and now I also live in the Yukon.
I'm also speaking to you as a policy analyst. With that in mind, I was speaking with Mr. Aldag at the break. We here in the Yukon do things collaboratively. It's the same in the Northwest Territories. Basically, because you don't have the population, you have to work together. We do know each other on an individual basis. Half of the time someone will ask me what someone's last name is: “I don't know. It's Larry, our MP.” That's how it works here. We need each other.
But the other thing, too, is that when we had to basically come to some really tough decisions, we did it, even though it was a complicated answer, by basically identifying first the values that we wanted to keep and the principles. After that, we sat down to figure out the formula. It was a mathematical formula; it was not one simple system. In order to account for the rural communities, in order to account for the larger municipalities, that's what we had to do.
Once we did that, then we took it back out to everyone, because it was everybody's right to know and to have a voice on it. Then we were able to say, as a checklist, “Oh, and by the way, it meets these values. It meets these principles.” We could prove that. We did have to basically do up a calculator as a tool for the spreadsheets so the people could see what it did for them. They need that kind of an example.
As far as the youth go, I'm sorry, a big part of it, yes, is the education system and having them walk through it. Even though it was kindergarten, you remember that event. But we also dragged our kids out every time we had to go to vote.
Thank you.