One of the things the provinces moved forward with is a consultation directory, which we're about to launch. What it does is provide, in one place, information on all of the opportunities the public had to weigh in on. Policy or discussion or dialogue are issues that the government is interested in hearing the public's opinion on.
It will give them social media ways to ask questions or to offer ideas. It requires a best practice that after we go out and hold these sessions, we document all the learning from that—what we learned from the public—and archive it permanently on this site, so we'll be able to go back every five years when we do a five-year poverty plan to look at what we learned five years ago when we went out and talked to the public.
That consultation directory is developed and ready to go, and it will be evergreen all the time. Every time we think about going out to talk about transit funding, or minimum wage rates, or whatever we're talking to the public about, that will be the first place you will be able to go. You will able to see how long it's open, where the physical sessions are, and what the social media ways of interacting are so that we can listen to what the public has to say.
The other thing we're doing with Don's help is experimenting with some other ways to engage the public rather than the standard: bring everybody into a room, frame the issue, hear what they have to say, thank them, send them away, and then create our own set of policy options and implement them ourselves, and so on.
What we have been trying for over a year now, with Don's leadership, and it has shown some good success to date, is to bring all the vested stakeholders around an issue together and have them own the process, where the government simply sits at the table as a voice. It's challenging because it requires us to give up power. It's challenging because we lose control of the timing of the process, and it's challenging because you have to get groups that might not normally speak together and work together to speak together and work together. But what it has proven is that you get much better solutions, you get much richer dialogue, you get stakeholders who are willing to bend and compromise, and you get much better outcomes.