I'd like to offer a few comments on that. Certainly, going back to my opening remarks on the joint consortium, it's unfortunate that Quebec is not yet a participant. We would certainly hope that one day they would choose to participate. This is not a formal FPT mechanism. It is a voluntary group of provinces, territories, and, perhaps at some later date, others, who will come together to share best practices. The federal government doesn't in any way take a lead in that. Rather than being the single window, we have behind us sort of an army, in various departments, of all kinds of research data things that are going on that might be helpful. They might not be, but they very well might be helpful.
We can help the provinces and the territories, where they would like our participation, where they would like our assistance related to some of the data collection being done by Stats Canada or some of the programs or some of the campaigns, or maybe we could tweak those in order to better align with where the provinces and the territories would like to go. But beyond that, it is just an excellent forum for sharing, which is really what we want to do.
Certainly, as with many things, not all provinces and territories are in the same position as a result of their geographic context or their priorities. This is a great opportunity for provinces like Nova Scotia and British Columbia, who are doing marvellous things--and I realize Quebec is also--to be able to come together and share with one another what some of those practices are and to see how they might fit the different circumstances across the country or how we might adjust them to fit.
This consortium is new, but we're past the bureaucratic bump of getting up and running. We're actually starting to move now. We're getting some knowledge summaries and some scans out and getting a pretty good website up, through which we can share information with school boards, with parents, with NGOs, as well as with each other. There's some really good, very practical, down-on-the-ground kind of work that is starting to go on, now that we're past how we were going to govern ourselves, and all that sort of thing, and it's a huge opportunity. And because it doesn't have official FPT status--it is a voluntary organization--it perhaps presents ways to work together that in some ways transcend the dilemmas we sometimes have doing that.