Especially when we focus on the role of education policy and look closer—obviously it's a constitutional responsibility for the provinces—we see it's a really mixed bag across the country. I did research on Ontario, for example, when it instituted a mandatory civics course. The answer to your question should have been that everyone should take civics, like a policy answer. When Ontario instituted the course there were problems with the policy implementation and with the staffing in schools, where you had teachers and they couldn't figure out what they should teach, so they gave them civics.
I think part of that ecosystem you're talking about is about knowledge and awareness. I've been involved in research related to civics and the possibility of young people becoming more active or engaged if we focus on civic education at the high school level. Henry Milner and I published a paper. We could track, through an actual experiment, whether people who had taken that grade 10 civics course voted more. There was a bit of an increase.
I would parlay this to Professor Everitt's answer to one of these questions about engagement. I can't remember if she mentioned it or not, but for people who are disengaged, there is this phrase you may have heard from other witnesses, the idea of being tuned out. It's not even that they're engaged, don't like what they see, and are rejecting it. They aren't even there. They're not even assessing the strengths or weaknesses of a system.
One of the ways we can address what is quite an abstract and pretty major challenge in terms of engagement is through opportunities in education policy, and there are a lot of actors out there. As I mentioned, I used the term “modest” on purpose because even looking at electoral agencies across the country, you see most don't even have a budget line for voter education, so you can't really even track it. The one I did find was from a few years ago, where B.C. had maybe $15,000 out of a $15-million budget.