Your first question, I think, was about why the student vote, rep day and other types of programs are important. Where else do you see stuff like that happening in a young person's life outside of a school? I don't. You may. Some families have great positive reinforcement of democratic participation or service.
I'm going to try to go slowly. I apologize.
Schools remain a sacred space, and educators remain highly committed, dedicated Canadians who want to create citizens before they create employees. There isn't anywhere else for that, so that, to me, is why this is important.
You asked what has been most important. Is that kind of like asking what I have seen that's most effective? Yes, okay.
There's a way of looking at this. You may be looking at new things to do. There has been talk about a democracy fund and things like this. I think what you want to do, before anything else, is identify your assets. What do you have that you can use and strengthen before you worry about creating something new? That would be the first thing.
Again, I'm out of the group, so it doesn't benefit me in any way. If you were worried about something like media literacy or civic education, you could look at a group like Civix, which has 60,000 committed teachers who can turn on a dime in a snap federal election to get a million kids to do something. That's what I'm talking about when you're looking at your assets.
Maybe I'll take that to a scale outside of schools. You probably all know this. Maybe there's a bit of an age difference in the room, and maybe there isn't—I'm 48—but a lot of our civic infrastructure in the past was built by community groups. These community groups were the Lions clubs, the Rotary clubs and other types of things that really don't exist in the same way they did 10 or 20 years ago.
You can go to different academics who will tell you it has been influenced by this...our entertainment, our technology. I wonder if there's a way in which it could be time for a resurgence in that type of public activity, shared activity, face-to-face activity with each other. It could be done in a number of different ways.
I'm privy to some research that isn't out yet, but it involved 2,500 middle school and high school students across the country. It asked them, “If there were a national service program that was meant to help you meet other people and learn some skills—maybe there's a little bit of an honorarium or something like this—would you be interested?”
Twenty-five per cent of the kids said, right off the top, that they'd be interested, and 45% said that they would be interested but that it might be better for somebody else. All they saw was a paragraph, right? What could we do that involves people and gives them constructive outlets where they can learn skills?
That's why I was bringing up these ideas about this infrastructure in terms of what our armed forces are about to try to do. Maybe they could turn more outward facing and be less insular.
What are the other existing assets that we can use for public engagement? I don't know about you, but my kids are learning about their city and getting to know kids outside of their classroom simply because of the sports that they're involved in. There shouldn't be any impediment whatsoever to having families and people playing together. I know this involves the provinces and the municipalities—and some of the municipalities do this so well—but kids should be playing together, and it's not just soccer. My younger guy doesn't want to play soccer, but he could do other things, so we need to look at how we really grow that.
There's another thing, and this goes maybe a bit beyond that, but the best asset we could use to create public engagement is our geography. If you want to know Canada, you just have to get out of wherever you live and get to know this country. I thought the train pass was a great thing, but the flights are ridiculous. The problem is that most people can't take a train for four days. You can't have a 10-day trip across Canada to spend a day in Halifax.