Good morning, dear colleagues.
Madam Chair, happy birthday, and we wish you a lovely day and a good year.
I just want to say that I support what Mr. Blaikie has brought forward, and I also support this amendment. I think all of us would agree that politics is about staying in touch with people and about their having their say in their community.
In our community, we work hard to reach out to the community to hear their views, and to hear their ideas. In Etobicoke North, I have had this huge council from day one, and we want to make sure that our association is representative of our wonderful community. I believe the whole point of politics is for people to get involved and to help build a better country.
If we look at some of the data internationally, such as this data from the Pew Research Center, an average of 64% of people across 34 countries do not believe that elected officials really care about what citizens think. We should be disturbed by that.
One solution is to include more deliberation within our democracy, and I think citizen assemblies are an increasingly popular way of doing so. Depending on where they are in the world, they are groups of about 100 people broadly representative of the population, meeting over several weeks or months to debate topics.
I think it's important to broaden it out, and I know Mr. Blaikie has said he is supportive of Mr. Turnbull's amendment. I think it's important to broaden it out too. In the past 10 years, the OECD has shown a real increase in citizen [Technical difficulty—Editor] undertaking such a study we can look at how effective they are, where they've been implemented, what the guiding principles are, as well as membership and how members are chosen, how they operate, and whether there's a secretariat. I think there are a lot of questions we could be asking.
I think the question will not be whether deliberative democracy becomes a more intrinsic part of our democratic traditions but rather when and how, so I am strongly supportive of the amendment.
Thank you.