As you were talking, I was thinking about a book I wrote a couple of years ago called Losing Confidence. It was about the crisis in Canadian democracy. In doing my research, I found that it wasn't a generalized phenomenon that youth were voting less everywhere. The most pronounced areas where youth were voting a lot less than the older generations were in first-past-the-post countries. Youth in Scandinavia—at least the research I was finding when I was writing that book, which was in 2008, indicated—were voting at the same levels as their elders. They also had a tremendous level of political and civic literacy, since they read on average several different newspapers every day.
I've been struck through the course of this hearing—so I'm going to name something that I'm concerned about and just ask for your comments—that we're not getting any media coverage, for the most part. We're not getting covered as we go across the country listening to Canadians. This is the end of the third week of very intensive hearings. I think a good part of civic literacy and political literacy is having an active fifth estate that's actually covering issues of democracy.
Do you have any comments on that as an aspect of what Maryantonett Flumian called the ecosystem of democracy? I think there's a role for media. Do you have any thoughts on that?