Where Professor Tworek ended is really important. There are multiple ways Canadians can engage with each other in civil society, and we've defaulted to the worst of them for most of our political discourse, which is having our political discussions via the infrastructure and incentives of social media platforms. We all know what this has done to our political discourse and, ultimately, to the strength of our civil society and our civil resilience.
I really believe that there's a massive appetite for these more deliberative forms of civic engagement. Citizens want them, and the transformation that occurs, as Professor Tworek mentioned, is real. We're doing the fifth of our large-scale citizens' assemblies now. This one is with 100 gen Z Canadians, who are represented from across the country, on how they want AI to be developed, as they are the generation that will live through whatever we allow to be developed. They are passionate. They've come up with a set of policy proposals that are meaningful.
You asked what needs to be added to these things to make them work. The challenges are twofold.
The first one is that there is not a meaningful government interlocutor for their findings, because the government chose not to participate actively in it. Its representatives will be attending the formal presentation. It's great that they're doing this, but assemblies have a real risk of bringing people into a democratic process but then disenfranchising them from it if their findings are not meaningfully engaged. I know you've heard from other people at this committee who've argued for some form of institutional capacity to do assemblies, to support them and to engage with them as part of a legislative process. This would be transformative, in my view.
The second is that assemblies only reach a small number of people—the 100 or so who participate in them—at great expense. There need to be ways of expanding this to broader numbers of people. We've been testing different methods, various moments in assemblies, by using digital tools to expand their reach and engagement to tens of thousands of people, as opposed to dozens of people.
Those two things together could be transformative.