Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I was just mentioning that Facebook is another way in which government can consult Canadians on social media. Facebook Live is a particularly interesting tool that I know some members of government have used because it allows for some real-time interaction, with questions and answers and whatnot. The government might consider doing that.
Just to bring it back to the amendment at hand, the question then would be, again, why would you require $750,000 to do a consultation like that? Access to Facebook is free for most uses, including doing something on Facebook Live. That would enable government to be able to consult a cross-section of Canadians quite directly and save on the expensive travel. Of course, sometimes travel is an expense that comes in the course of consultation, whether that's government consultation or, as we know quite well, committee consultation. This committee has travelled before. I recall sitting in, before I was a permanent member of this committee, when the committee was in Winnipeg on the Canada Post issue. Of course, that kind of travel isn't free, but part of the point is that we don't know whether travel is foreseen as an item in the $750,000 being asked for here.
Instagram, of course, is another social media platform. I'll leave it to experts to determine whether or not that's a good consultation tool. I'm more familiar with Twitter and Facebook. It seems to me they're more interactive in the appropriate way with respect to consultation. It's difficult to get a clear sense of what Canadians might want for a federal election debate process simply through images, although some Canadians are pretty adept at creating memes. One can imagine that there might be some insightful and humorous communication by a number of those Canadians through an Instagram consultation. I'll leave it to minds smarter than mine to envision exactly what that might look like.
You might actually need to have some funds in order to develop the concept of an Instagram consultation. I'm not sure of the cost, but surely not $750,000, or at least I hope not; if it did cost that much, I would think that would be far too much to spend on a social media experiment. Canadians shouldn't be required to pay that bill when at some point, I would think, if Instagram consultation does have a promising future, we'll see members of the private sector develop that in order to realize its potential.
As well—