I'd like to interject at this point, too. In my view, one of the most important impacts, or the educational basis, has to be a bipartisan or tripartisan understanding of the core security threats facing Canada. The education and leadership that our political elites provide direct the way a lot of Canadians get their understanding. We can talk about Facebook and all the rest, but consider these two things.
From a conservative perspective, remember when we had the four casualties in Afghanistan, and rather than hiding.... To a certain degree, there was a bipartisan agreement: if you died on peacekeeping, that was kept secret. The 176 or 177 Canadians who gave their lives on peacekeeping were never talked about. We never had ceremonies. When that was changed after the four individuals were killed in Afghanistan, look at how the Canadian public changed. When we hear Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Foreign Affairs talking about the Russian threat just before the defence policy comes forward, we see Canadians getting up and paying attention.
This is one thing a lot of us on the academic side get frustrated with. Ultimately we know you guys understand what the core threat is, and we know there is agreement, but because of our parliamentary system, each of you always has to show how the other is either not getting it or is opposed. On the crucial, core issues, if we could hear tripartisan or at least bipartisan agreement saying this is a real problem and we actually want to put aside partisan disagreements, that would get Canadians' attention.
You can't do it on all things, obviously, but if you can highlight the importance that when in fact there are these existential threats—and I would argue we've been facing that since 2008—we can get agreement on it.... You guys agree on it. If we could get you coming forward and saying you agree on it, that would be very significant from an educational perspective.