Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate your saying, Mr. Hart, that essentially the government has the responsibility to be consulting with the public. That is something that has certainly come out of these brief hearings. Hopefully government members will understand that they need to open up this process so that we can have debates over each and every one of these initiatives.
I'd like to come back to you, Dr. Healy, as well as you, Monsieur Pépin and Madam Burrows, on two elements that are fundamental to this.
One is the issue of what direction we as a country believe we should be going in and how this initiative has essentially been kept away from the public domain, so we can have these public discussions. What should the government be doing to ensure that we have those full public consultations, so that Canadians can be assured that if we head down this road, it is a road Canadians agree with?
We know that part of the strategy, because we've heard from the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, is to keep it away from public debate, because they say there is no appetite for a big debate now. They are seizing on the fact that in the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement debate that we had in 1988, aside from the electoral system going against this, essentially most Canadians voted against that agreement. The fact that most Canadian families have been poorer since, despite the government's protestations to the contrary, shows that Canadians were right to be concerned. NAFTA had a similar debate, and most Canadians voted against NAFTA because the Jean Chrétien government had promised to not put it into effect.
How do we get that democracy back, so that Canadians are actually being consulted on these issues?