Thanks to everyone, our witnesses for today and members of the audience. As the member of Parliament who is probably closest to where we're located—my riding is Cloverdale—Langley City—I wanted to thank all the audience members for coming out. I look forward to hearing from you as we get into the open-mike session today.
We've heard in some of the testimony about the great work that was done in B.C. with the citizens' assembly, and the two of you have talked specifically to that. Yesterday, we had two of the participants from the B.C. Citizens' Assembly speak to us. I would like to get your thoughts on the practicalities of taking that model to a national scale.
The B.C. model, as was mentioned, had gender parity, because there was a man and a woman randomly selected from each riding. To do that in Canada, with 338 ridings, we'd be looking at 676 participants. There are cost implications, time implications, and travel implications. I like the idea of trying to get some sort of consensus, whatever that looks like and whatever the threshold for agreement is. It's a large number.
Ms. Dias and Mr. Moscrop, maybe the two of you could comment on that. Have you looked at the success of the B.C. Citizens' Assembly, and if that could be applied on a national scale? One of the women who was before us said that if she was asked to do what she was asked to do for the province on a national level, then she would say no, simply because of the travel commitment.
Ms. Dias, have you looked at the benefits and how that could apply to the national stage?