I'm going to be a bit provocative, maybe. I would like each of the witnesses to respond.
Thank you for coming.
There are a number of trends in society making—in my mind, anyway—civic resilience more challenging. Certainly, social media is one of those. We are all increasingly living in silos.
It's also true that we are a more urbanized society. I grew up in Saskatchewan, and there are many communities there where the sense of community is very strong. However, I live in Vancouver, and I would tell you most folks don't even know who their neighbours are. It's an increasingly atomized society. Couple this with the fact that, for better or for worse, churchgoing attendance has declined. This was one of the fundamental sources of community; people got together and actually had conversations.
The macro level is quite challenging.
I would also say that with respect to trying to encourage engagement, every one of the MPs in this room tries to do various kinds of things to encourage grassroots participation, whether it's through town halls or a range of things. I'd be shocked if it's different for any of the other MPs. The same faces come to those engagements every time. It's a tiny fraction of the citizens who live in each of our ridings.
With mechanisms like a citizens' assembly—I think somebody mentioned that another country had taken lessons from us—our experience with a citizens' assembly in British Columbia was around electoral reform, and it didn't drive higher voter turnout. It didn't succeed.
What I would be really interested in hearing about from you guys is not the high-level conversation but what specific things you would recommend that we do to try to turn some of these things around. How can they be scalable? I heard one of you mention Katimavik. It's a great program, but it touches a tiny number of people.
What specific things would you recommend, and how do you ensure that they can be done at scale?