That's no problem. Could I be slow and also, maybe, add back the time from the pause?
Are we good? Okay. I'm sorry about that. I will try my best to slow it down. It's not my greatest skill.
In last year's federal election, 7,100 schools and one million students cast a student vote ballot. As I said, on a rainy day, maybe you'll want to recognize that you caused four million voting experiences in kids under the voting age through the work of this committee, so thank you.
You sure picked a doozy with this standing order. I will cut it up a little. I'll start with a quick comment on what I think the state of civic resilience is in Canada right now.
I think we're very resilient—so far. I've looked into civil resilience over the last few years. It's led me to speak to the most amazing people in this country and around the world. There's a very special breed of person with whom I've had the privilege of speaking: past and current members of our armed forces.
I shared a meal with someone last night. His name is Dave. He was a major in the Canadian Army. He quit at the time of the Ukraine invasion, and he went and fought on the front lines. He knows what I've been up to. He said something when we left this really cute little pub on Elgin Street. These are his exact words: “Resilience is the only thing you can't build during a war. Once the war starts, you can figure everything else out. If you don't have the will, you don't have anything.” I know we're not talking about a war today, and that's okay, but you could put a little blank space about that quote. “Resilience is the only thing you can't build during” and then a blank space.
The second part of your standing order is about what to do to build resilience. That's my interpretation. I think what you're really looking at is attachment. That's what you want to do. You want to focus on attachment to each other, to Canada and to our values and ideals as a country.
One point I'll leave you with today is getting to the how. I love the how. I've focused on the how of civic engagement and education for 20 years. It's what I do. Let's look at how you get people to know each other and get attached to Canada. There's an incredible opportunity. It seems to be a very different moment regarding some of the things our armed forces are exploring. It's about the growth of our primary reserve and the potential for a strategic reserve. I don't know whether Mr. Wilkinson.... There was a question related to one of the testimonies earlier on in this committee that talked about scale. It talked about Katimavik, which may have 10,000 kids a year, and other things. That's great. I'm used to hundreds of thousands and millions. We have an opportunity to encourage our armed forces to be entrepreneurial in how they look at the development of this supplementary and strategic reserve.
I'll leave you with that. There are a number of other things I can comment on related to your previous witnesses.
Again, I appreciate the work you do.