Thank you for giving me an opportunity to answer that question.
One of the problems we see is that, in order to counter this very powerful influence of fossil fuel industry and big business associations, we need to have a very mobilized public that understands what's really at stake here, what the urgency of this climate crisis is and what the implications of it are. Any government that's going to take significant action to deal with a climate crisis is going to need public support. It's going to need a well-educated citizenry that, again, understands what's at stake and what the options are on the table before us. We need to have the opportunity to review all of the options and not just a selected few that filter down to us through already privileged interests.
One of the ways we can think about doing this, for example, is to create regional citizens' assemblies, and these assemblies could also look at different sectoral aspects of a broader, comprehensive plan for a green transition. This would give the government an opportunity to get recommendations from well-informed citizens who've had an opportunity to listen to the experts, understand the science, understand the options available. It could then move forward to say, “Look, we've consulted citizens; we've had a democratic process; we have this kind of feedback.”
This process, obviously, has to be broader than citizen assemblies, because we have to get provincial governments to the table to agree on the principles for allocating responsibility for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and the redistribution of the revenue that's going to have to accompany this to make sure that various regions of the country are not left out.
Finally, we need to include first nations and Métis people in these consultation processes in a different way, on a nation-to-nation basis. This is a process that could become permanent—