Ms. Mathyssen, we have two significant deficits here that we can identify. One is that this country does not have a systematic network of institutes that do political education.
In Germany, for instance, each of the political parties has a taxpayer-funded foundation. Those foundations operate at arm's length from the party, in the sense that all the activities they do need to be open and so forth. Their key component in Germany is political education for the population. They do a fantastic job at that. It is part of the reason—I mean, this is a multifactor problem—the European population and the German population in particular are much more politically astute and much more aware of public policy in general.
The particular challenge the CAF has is that it has no presence in most of our urban centres, because repeated governments effectively closed those bases and moved the CAF out. If you go into a school in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, most students have never met anyone who works for the CAF. They have never met anyone in uniform. They have never even met a federal civil servant. It is not even on their radar.
As a result, there are huge misconceptions about the role that institutions such as the Canadian Armed Forces play in terms of our domestic, regional and international interests. One ready thing the government could do is make sure that the CAF are more connected with students and that its federal institutions are more connected. The problem with that is that not only the CAF, but just about all federal departments, are so short on staff that they don't have additional people they can actually send out to build those relationships.
One thing I think we can do is look at how the federal government can build better relationships and socialize the Canadian population as a whole, and in particular high school students, into the role of the federal government. Then, implicitly through that, it can socialize them into democratic norms without treading on provincial jurisdiction in terms of primary, secondary and tertiary education.